Gonzaga Debate Institute 2010

War Turns Rape

War increases patriarchy and sexual violence- rape used as a weapon

Robson 93 [Angela, London-based freelance journalist specializing in human-rights issues, June 1993, New Internationalist, Rape: weapon of war, http://www.newint.org/issue244/rape.htm, accessed 7/13]

The sexual abuse of women in war is nothing new. Rape has long been tolerated as one of the spoils of war, an inevitable feature of military conflict like pillage and looting. What is new about the situation in Bosnia is the attention it is receiving – and the recognition that it is being used as a deliberate military tactic to speed up the process of ‘ethnic cleansing’. According to a recent report by European Community investigators, rapes are being committed in ‘particularly sadistic ways to inflict maximum humiliation on victims, their families, and on the whole community’.1 In many cases the intention is ‘deliberately to make women pregnant and to detain them until pregnancy is far enough advanced to make termination impossible’. Women and girls aged anything between 6 and 70 are being held in camps throughout the country and raped repeatedly by gangs of soldiers. Often brothers or fathers of these women are forced to rape them as well. If they refuse, they are killed.
Rape is justified by government in times of war

Robson ’93 [Angela, London-based freelance journalist specializing in human-rights issues, June 1993, New Internationalist, Rape: weapon of war, http://www.newint.org/issue244/rape.htm, accessed 7/13]

To Zainab Jama, the Somali writer and former BBC broadcaster, the silence surrounding such violence is a measure of its effectiveness. Her research on her own country indicates that acts of unspeakable brutality are being carried out against women in the civil war raging there. ‘Who knows how many victims of rape there are in Somalia? No-one can estimate the number though one can speak in terms of many thousands. All we do know is that the victims of war rape are being ignored in Somalia. The West simply does not wish to know what is happening there.’ Rape is unlawful in both international conflicts and civil war. But, according to Amnesty International, many governments do not uphold these norms and are often complacent in the face of such abuses. On a visit to Peru’s Ayacucho department in 1986, for example, Amnesty was told by legal officers that rape by government troops conducting counter-insurgency operations ‘was to be expected’ and that prosecutions for such assaults were unlikely to happen. Women raped by soldiers in emergency zones were warned not to report it lest they suffer reprisals. What can be done to protect women from such violations? According to Françoise Hampson, lecturer in international law at the UK’s Essex University, what is lacking is the will to prosecute. ‘The act, rape, must be punished. Nothing should be allowed to jeopardize the prosecution of those alleged to have committed rape.’

The culture of war allows men to rape as a means of asserting dominance

Goldstein 1 [Joshua S., Professor of Women’s Studies at Emeritus, School of International Service, American University, “War and Gender”, 2001, Google Books]

Rape in wartime may arise from different motivations than in peacetime. Among other reasons, a male soldier rapes because “war…has awakened his aggressiveness, and he directs it at those who play a subordinate role in the world of war.” Wartime also offers different opportunities. One US soldier in Vietnam said: “They are in an all-male environment….. There are women available. Those women are of another culture, another colour, another society… You’ve got an M-16. What do you need to pay a lady for? You go down to the village and take what you want. “ Some said that having sex and then killing the woman made the soldier a “double veteran. In one view, raping by soldiers in wartime results from the weakening of social norms—parallel with increased sex, swearing, looting, cruelty, and other such behaviors. Some see a “return to nature” in war. The US Infantry Journal in 1943 referred to soldiers as “a society of men, frequently unwashed, who have been dedicated to the rugged task of killing other men, and whose training has emphasized that a certain reversion to the primitive is not undesirable.” Romantic or forced sexual conquests reflect “the rapist in every man.” “Copulation under such circumstances is an act of aggression; the girl is the victim and her conquests the victor’s triumph. Preliminary resistance on her part always increases his satisfaction.”

War Turns Patriarchy

Emphasis on “male” deaths ignores the inordinate number of female victims of war- reveals patriarchy of war

Chew 5 [Huibin Amee, Joint Degree in Social Studies and Women from Harvard University, “Why the War is Sexist (And Why We Can’t Ignore Gender Anymore)”http://www.insurgentamerican.net/analysis/why-the-war-is-sexist/ ]

In the 20th century, 90 percent of all war deaths have been of unarmed women, children, and men. 1 As the occupation wears on, more and more Iraqi women and girls are killed – reported as “collateral damage.” Bombs and modern war weapons murder and maim noncombatant women in approximately equal numbers to noncombatant men – even if from the U.S. perspective, men make up the vast majority of our war dead. Soldiers are not those primarily losing their lives in this occupation. At the same time, note that U.S. imperialism benefits from certain strategies that maximize “collateral damage” (such as using long-distance, high tech weapons rather than infantry), because these also minimize our own soldiers’ deaths and the potential public relations blowup. The tendency to devalue the enemies’ lives is reinforced by not only racist but also sexist ideologies – history is made by “our boys,” and enemy females’ deaths are not even acknowledged. Putting U.S. soldiers’ deaths abroad in the context of other wartime deaths occurring at home causes another shift in perspective. For example, during World War II, U.S. industrial workers were more likely than U.S. soldiers to die or be injured. Historian Catherine Lutz observes, “The female civilians who worked on bases or in war industries can be seen as no less guardians or risk-takers than people in uniform.” 2 This is not to downplay the amount of suffering and exploitation soldiers are forced to endure, but to widen our scope of who we recognize as affected in war.

War amplifies female suffering- economically
Chew 5 [Huibin Amee, Joint Degree in Social Studies and Women from Harvard University, “Why the War is Sexist (And Why We Can’t Ignore Gender Anymore)”http://www.insurgentamerican.net/analysis/why-the-war-is-sexist/ ]

With the destruction of Iraq’s economy, women and girls have suffered especially from deprivations. In the article, “Occupation is Not (Women’s) Liberation: Confronting ‘Imperial Feminism’ and Building a Feminist Anti-War Movement,” I discuss in detail some gendered ways Iraqi women and girls disproportionately bear effects of the country’s economic collapse – from unemployment to the dramatic drop in female literacy. In the U.S., poor women bear the brunt of public service cuts. In Massachusetts, for example, most Medicaid recipients, graduates of state and community colleges, welfare and subsidized childcare recipients, are women – and all these programs have faced budget slashes. Most families living in poverty are headed by single mothers.