Eradicating Sexual Violence

Throughout the last two centuries, victims, feminists, politicians, lawmakers, police and community activists - and none of these categories are mutually exclusive, of course - have debated how sexual violence can be diminished, if not eradicated.

Briefly, however, from the nineteenth century to the present, many attempts to reduce sexual violence have been unconstructive. Demands that the law enforcement agencies must ‘simply lock ’em up and throw away the key’ do not work. Victim blaming - an attitude that is embedded in suggestions that women police their own behaviour, upgrade their secur­ity and comport themselves modestly - is common. Too many anti-rape initiatives warn women to avoid ‘dark alleys’ and ‘short skirts’. Advising girls and women to ‘stay at home’ is equally unhelpful: household survival often depends upon female labour in the fields, forests and marketplaces, so insisting on purdah is impossible. And domestic spheres are crowded with abusers anyway.

Other proposals make emotional sense, but have minimal effect outside the immediate context. This includes attempts by individual women to seek out ways to humiliate their attackers publicly. In nineteenth-century England, for instance, known sexual abusers might be paraded around the village to local jeers; the windows of their homes broken; their credit rejected in the market square. In the contemporary period, vigilantism against sexually violent men has also flourished, most notably in India where the Pink Sari Gang (or the Gulabi Gang) are the world’s largest female vigilante group, boasting over 20,000 members. Local justice may be gratifyingly retributive, but will never change a culture of sexualised violence.

Still other solutions are palliative. Prison reform - including greater surveillance of institutional blind spots (such as shower rooms and dorm facilities) - might have some effect, but at the cost of greater intrusiveness into the lives of everyone, and not just sexually aggressive people.

Most solutions to sexual violence focus on specific elements of the pro­blem. Lawyers believe in better laws; international relations experts place their faith in inter-state agreements. Feminists debate whether the solution is less pornography or better pornography. Do we need a return to family values or a celebration of (sensual-oriented) sexual liberation? Should men march in the streets with placards sporting the problematic slogan ‘Hands Off Our Women' or should women do it for themselves, as did Haitian women when they established Solidarite Fanm Ayisyen/SOFA (Haitian Women’s Solidarity Group) and Kay Fanm (Women’s House)? In the late twentieth century, support for rape crisis centres grew, although they have been chronically under-funded.

Tackling wartime sexual violence will probably require broader strategies. One of the most debilitating myths for those of us seeking to forge more peaceful worlds is the assertion that sexual violence is inevitable. However, rape is not ‘about’ male biology or an evolutionary inheritance; it varies greatly over geographical space and historical time, as I argue in Rape: A History from the 1860s to the Present (2007). Even in armed conflicts, there are wide variations in the nature and degree of sexual violence - with some conflicts experiencing very little. Although rape is high during what interna­tional scholar Mary Kaldor has called ‘new wars’ - that is, those that are counterinsurgent or guerrilla in nature and where the lines between armed forces and organised crime are blurred^[230] - it is low in armed groups that possess a strong degree of internal discipline and ideological values.^[231] Cultures with sexual equality, high levels of female economic power and low levels of armed conflict tend to have relatively low levels of rape.^[232] Sexual abusers learn how to act as sexual abusers within specific historical communities.