Gaby Zipfel: "Blood, sperm and tears" - Sexual Violence in War
The societal condemnation of sexual crimes as a war-time practice is slowly growing as the victims raise the courage to speak out.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , February 20, 2001:
With respect to the issue of retribution for the 'comfort women', the Japanese government is playing for time, hoping that a phenomenon for which they do not intend to take responsibility, will be past history. But this strategy is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. The Tokyo Tribunal, public perceptions of UN reports on recent incidents in East Timor and, most importantly, the February 2001 decisions of the international court in the Hague in the 'Foca Trial', according to which rape must be sanctioned as a war crime - all these events are evidence that sexual violence against women, as a virtually ever-present phenomenon of past and current wars, has recently become the focus of increased public attention.
It would seem that sexual violence against women does not become a topic of public discussion until women who were its victims have an opportunity to speak out.
Until the late nineteen sixties, there were widely held views that talk of rape was more or less interspersed with hysterical female fantasies, that such acts were provoked, consciously or unconsciously, by women, and that they were perpetrated by sick or criminal individuals. It was not until the early nineteen seventies that feminist authors, among them Susan Brownmiller, Germaine Greer, Susan Griffin, and Kate Millett, countered these widely held views with a radically different perspective. In books like Against our will (Brownmiller), Sex and domination (Millett), and Rape: the all-American crime (Griffin) they pointed out the extent to which rape was an everyday occurrence and the function of sexual violence as a means of stabilizing hierarchical gender relations in times of peace and war. The work of these authors was empirically underpinned with the personal accounts of women who felt encouraged in revealing their experiences because of the women's movement. In 1971, Susan Griffin concluded that
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2001-11-29-zipfel-en.html
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , February 20, 2001:
Brigadier General Tono Suratnam reportedly raped at least one woman in East Timor. Suratnam, now stationed in Jakarta, served as commander in East Timor from June 1998 until August 1999. Before the Timorese voted for independence from Indonesia in a referendum on August 30, 1999, Jakarta's soldiers and police perpetrated ... thousands of crimes against humanity there ... Rape, the crime the general is suspected of having committed, was a widespread tactic employed by the Indonesian forces to control rebellious provinces in the world's largest island state. In East Timor, there were 'rape houses', such as the former Tropical Motel in Dili, where women who were not yet eighteen were kept as 'sex slaves' for soldiers of all ranks...
Esmeralda Boe and Morta Abu Bare are from East Timor and are old enough to be the grandmothers of the teenage Timorese girls. In December 2000, shortly before the German newspaper article cited above appeared, they testified before the International Tokyo Tribunal on the sexual crimes committed by the Japanese military during World War II, reporting on what they had been subjected to as children more than fifty years ago. The Japanese abducted an estimated 200 000 girls and women from various countries in East Asia and brought them to the Japanese theaters of war, in order to provide 'comfort' to their soldiers. The Japanese term for comfort is jan. An English-German dictionary also refers to "soldier's comfort" and translates this phrase as Liebesgabe [gift of love] - an indication that the practice of providing soldiers with coerced sexual intercourse is not a Japanese invention.With respect to the issue of retribution for the 'comfort women', the Japanese government is playing for time, hoping that a phenomenon for which they do not intend to take responsibility, will be past history. But this strategy is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. The Tokyo Tribunal, public perceptions of UN reports on recent incidents in East Timor and, most importantly, the February 2001 decisions of the international court in the Hague in the 'Foca Trial', according to which rape must be sanctioned as a war crime - all these events are evidence that sexual violence against women, as a virtually ever-present phenomenon of past and current wars, has recently become the focus of increased public attention.
It would seem that sexual violence against women does not become a topic of public discussion until women who were its victims have an opportunity to speak out.
Until the late nineteen sixties, there were widely held views that talk of rape was more or less interspersed with hysterical female fantasies, that such acts were provoked, consciously or unconsciously, by women, and that they were perpetrated by sick or criminal individuals. It was not until the early nineteen seventies that feminist authors, among them Susan Brownmiller, Germaine Greer, Susan Griffin, and Kate Millett, countered these widely held views with a radically different perspective. In books like Against our will (Brownmiller), Sex and domination (Millett), and Rape: the all-American crime (Griffin) they pointed out the extent to which rape was an everyday occurrence and the function of sexual violence as a means of stabilizing hierarchical gender relations in times of peace and war. The work of these authors was empirically underpinned with the personal accounts of women who felt encouraged in revealing their experiences because of the women's movement. In 1971, Susan Griffin concluded that
Rape is an act of aggression in which the victim is denied her self-determination. It is an act of violence which, if not actually followed by beatings or murder, nevertheless always carries with it the threat of death. And finally, rape is a form of mass terrorism, for the victims of rape are chosen indiscriminately.
In the nineteen eighties discussion centered on the cultural constructions of femininity and masculinity which form the basis for the hegemonic relations between the sexes referred to above... read more:http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2001-11-29-zipfel-en.html
