Politicization of Sexual Violence: From Abolitionism to Peacekeeping (Gender in a Global/Local World)
Carol Harrington
Language: English
Pages: 250
ISBN: B01ENQDD9G
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In the 1990s, feminist scholars on the politics of rape experienced a sudden surge of interest in their, until then, marginal field. Why was the 1990s the right time for rape to become an international security problem? Furthermore, why suddenly in the 1990s did rape become problematized as an international issue not just by the feminist fringes of protest movements but also by intergovernmental bureaucracies? To explore these questions, Carol Harrington traces the historical change in the politicization of rape as an international problem and explains how early international women's organizations gained expert authority on rape by drawing on abolitionist rhetoric of bodily integrity. She discusses why they abandoned their politicization of rape in the inter-war period and why rape only reappeared as an international security question requiring gender expertise on trauma after the Cold War.
Governing Sexual Exploitation and Abuse 171 It is not that easy to buy sex … even if it has sounded like that in the papers … there are investigation units and all that shit and you don’t want to get caught … you are a loser if you get caught … so fucking embarrassing you know. (Nilsson May 17 2005 in Gustafsson 2007, 12). Nilsson’s friend Larsson agreed that close supervision and strict discipline made buying sex on a PKO next to impossible: “you always have to tell your commander where you
womanhood. For many, such representations smacked of racism. Nazi Sexual Violence Unlike the politicization of the African slave trade or of World War I German atrocities, Anglophone discussion of Nazi crimes rarely specified rape, although their organization of forced prostitution and sadistic sexual terrorizing of inmates of Jewish ghettos might have provided abundant material for such a discourse. As Wendy Gertjejanssen (2004, 255) has noted, books dealing with Nazi atrocity 74
the Nanking Safety Zone, including letters, statements and records of atrocities, rapes among them, compiled by the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, an organization of foreign nationals who decided to stay in the capital when it became clear that it would fall and most foreigners had fled. The events are now often remembered as “the Rape of Nanking/Nanjing.” Like the Nazis, the Japanese authorities set up brothels for their military forces throughout territories under their
While Barry and her co-thinkers revived an “abolitionist” approach to commercial sex, an alternative discourse of “sex work” also gained feminist support during the late 1980s. From the mid 1980s, the AIDs pandemic prompted the World Health Organization (WHO) to adopt sex worker discourse, encourage the formation of sex worker organizations and fund research about sex workers’ lives. Many scholars and activists involved in this milieu represented their advocacy as consistent with feminism and
aspirations to public power along with weak men for many of the ills of communism (Cuordileone 2005). Pathologizing Unfreedom 105 Thus, the US-led international human rights sector did not politicize communist women’s sexual freedom as a human rights problem. However, human rights research did produce information that linked sexual violence with torture. More importantly, the production of human rights knowledge provided a scientific discourse for theorizing sexual violence as a psychosocial