Repertoires of conflict-related sexual violence: Introducing the RSVAC data package

Scholars increasingly call for documentation and analysis of specific forms of conflict-related sexual violence. Moreover, accountability for crimes is stronger when specific patterns of victimization are documented. This article introduces the Repertoires of Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (RSVAC) data package, which assembles reports from 1989 to 2015 of forms of sexual violence by government/states forces, insurgent/rebel organizations, and pro-government militias for each conflict and year. RSVAC compiles the reported prevalence of eight forms of sexual violence – rape, sexual slavery and forced marriage, forced prostitution, sexual mutilation, forced pregnancy, forced sterilization and abortion, non-penetrative sexual torture, and sexual abuse (as well as that of multiple-perpetrator reports of each form). It includes extensive qualitative notes on reported incidents, as well as ‘conflict manuscripts’ that include the relevant portions of source documents. Disaggregating ‘sexual violence’ into its distinct forms enables analysis of the reported presence of forms of sexual violence across time, conflicts, and organizations. We illustrate its usefulness by highlighting hitherto neglected global patterns it suggests, and also discuss limitations, potential biases and underreporting that users need to take into account. We outline several research questions that the data can help answer and suggest how the data package could inform policy efforts to address sexual violence and its consequences.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

During 2018, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued twenty-one judgements in contentious cases, seven interpretations of previous judgements, nineteen orders on provisional measures, and one advisory opinion. The Court developed case law on several topics such as forced disappearance, crimes against humanity, violence against women, political rights, the right to work, and the right to health and, for the first time, established a state’s responsibility for violation of the principle of progressivity. We should also emphasize the new inter-American standards in relation to the mechanism of asylum and its recognition as a human right, to pardons, and to the obligation of enhanced due diligence and special protection in investigations and criminal proceedings based on sexual violence against children and adolescents, as well as state responsibility for acts of sexual torture by a non-state agent.

Marital Suffering in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry: A Feminist Reading

This article discusses marital suffering, as portrayed by Sylvia Plath from a feminist viewpoint, and claims that her delineation of marital afflictions is a tool of protest against patriarchal oppression. In a convention-ridden patriarchal society, a woman usually cannot express her voice and remains suffocated by her personal agony and ache. However, Plath tries to break the conventions in her poetry, by representing the unjust institution of patriarchal marriage, which treats women as commodities. Many critics have noted that Plath’s marital sufferings are responsible for her suicidal death, which is a means of protest against, and resistance to, patriarchy. Since her poetry represents both her psycho-social suffering and her fight against the margins set by patriarchal society, one may consider her poetry to be a weapon of setting her “self,” as well as other women’s, free from male-dominated psychological imprisonment. The article explores how Plath’s poetic persona emerges as the Phoenix, the libertarian spirit, by deliberately exposing her marital sufferings, psycho-sexual torture, husband’s infidelity, and the ultimate death resulting from conjugal unhappiness, which is interpreted as a protest against all kinds of patriarchal discriminations.

Risky dis/entanglements: Torture and sexual violence in conflict

Conflict-related sexual violence has become increasingly recognized in international spaces as a serious, political form of violence. As part of this process, distinctions between the categories of ‘sexual violence’ and ‘torture’ have blurred as scholars and other actors have sought to capitalize on the globally recognized status of torture in raising the profile of sexual violence. This move, while perhaps strategically promising, even already fruitful, prompts us to heed caution. What might we inadvertently engender by further pursuing such positioning? While torture and sexual violence have both been widely framed within the academic literature as strategic in recent decades, only torture, and not sexual violence, has emerged from elements of this literature as (potentially) legitimate, despite the slippages between them as categories of violence. This article offers one avenue for thinking through what an invigorated focus on sexual torture as a category of violence might unwittingly render possible, and thus for reflecting on the possible stakes of collapsing the categories of sexual violence and torture. Ultimately, we argue that we should perhaps resist the urge to frame sexual violence as torture and instead cleave to the sticky signifier of ‘the sexual’, despite the ways in which it has served to normalize, perpetuate and obfuscate grievous harms throughout history.

Sexual torture among Arabic-speaking Shi’a Muslim men and women in Iraq: Barriers to healing and finding meaning

Introduction: Rape and sexual torture are frequent experiences among torture survivors, but relatively little is known about how victims respond to and find meaning in these experiences. Method: This study used secondary qualitative interview data from 47 male and female Shi’a Arab victims and survivors of sexual torture and rape in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to examine how sexual torture affected them, what were the barriers to healing, how they found meaning in their experiences, and how their experiences varied by gender. Results: Respondents experienced profound psychological effects that lasted for years, including: shame, feeling broken and prematurely aged, and wanting to isolate themselves from others. Most female victims who were unmarried at the time of sexual torture never got married. Many survivors found meaning in their experiences by defining their suffering as unjust, placing their experience in the context of a hopeful narrative of Iraqi history, turning to religion, and calling for vengeance upon their persecutors. Discussion: The results of this study show how survivors of sexual torture, most of whom did not receive psychological treatment, draw upon their own resources to find meaning in existential trauma.

The health impact of (sexual) torture amongst Afghan, Iranian and Kurdish refugees: A literature review

Background: Amongst Muslim majority countries, torture is reported most in Afghanistan and Iran. In addition, despite the significant impact of sexual violence on individuals and public health, the issue has been poorly researched amongst victims of torture. Objectives: The original intention of this paper was to review the health impact of sexual torture amongst Iranian and Afghan refugees in high-income countries; however, a comprehensive search of relevant databases did not produce any results. The aim of this review was then altered to examine those health-related studies that explored the impact of torture in this population. Special attention was given to the discussion of gender and sexual violence in those studies. Methodology: Web of Science, PILOTS, Medline, PsycINFO, Scopus, Popline and the online catalogue at DIGNITY were searched for health studies that examined the health impact or predictors of adverse health outcomes in Afghan, Iranian and Kurdish refugee survivors of torture. Outcome: Seven papers were identified and examined in this review. The results were limited by the diverse methodologies, by the use of psychiatric tools that had not been validated in this population, and by small sample sizes. Since there is a high prevalence of sexual torture in Iranian and Kurdish refugees, the issue merits greater attention in this population. Studies are most limited amongst the Afghan population. Moreover, there is a great need for further culture-andgender- specific health research in torture survivors from Muslim backgrounds.