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Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights (Elizabeth D. Heineman ed., Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press 2011), 342 pages, ISBN 9780812243185.
Sexual violence in conflict has garnered increasing attention in recent years, but as editor Elizabeth D. Heineman describes in the opening chapter of Sexual Violence in Conflict, our current understanding is largely based on generalizations drawn from a few recent conflicts.1 She makes the case for studying historical episodes of sexual violence in conflict by pointing out this serious limitation in the current literature and arguing that studying historical episodes can provide us with an understanding of long-term consequences and depictions of how societies achieve post conflict peace and stability.
With this neglect of historical examples in mind, the chapters in Sexual Violence in Conflict provide in depth analyses of pre-1990s episodes of sexual violence in conflict, including those in ancient Greece and Rome and even biblical examples, the Medieval West, Seventeenth-Century England, the Spanish Conquest of Alta California, the American Revolution, the American Civil War, Late Precolonial and Early Colonial Tanzania Uzbekistan in 1917, World War I, World War II, and East Pakistan/ Bangladesh in 1971. The book concludes with an excellent review of the legal history of rape and sexual violence in international humanitarian and human rights law, and discusses developments that have led toward more accountability in addressing sexual violence in conflict, due largely to initiatives and activities by survivors' groups and women's human rights advocates. The book is organized into five sections, but despite the diverse objectives of these sections, a salient theme throughout the volume is the contribution of gender inequality to sexual violence in conflict.
Functions of Systematic Sexual Violence in Conflict
The chapters reveal how organized sexual violence in conflict can serve various purposes including genocide, and economic, sexual, and social control. Marianne Kamp argues that widespread rape and femicide served the purpose of forcing women to conform to a social order in Uzbekistan during the Soviet government' s struggle to establish control after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.2 Factors that incited and sustained the violence against women included patriarchal assumptions about women's place in society, declarations from religious authorities against women's unveiling, community pressure...