‘Perpetrators as Victims'

A related problem is the dichotomy between ‘victims' and ‘perpetrators', when some people are both. There is clear evidence that many men and women who act in extremely aggressive ways have experienced sexual violation themselves.

Nevertheless, it is important to point out that ‘cycle of abuse' arguments have limited explanatory power. They don't help us understand why so many children who grow up in loving homes end up as aggressors, nor why so many people who were abused as children respond by joining the caring professions. Since girls are much more likely to be sexually victimised than boys, the argument also does not explain why sex offenders are pre­dominantly male.

‘Perpetrators as victims' appear most frequently in the brutalising context of combat. An example of this process can be seen in analyses of the mass rapes carried out by Red Army soldiers as they moved through Germany at the end of the Second World War. In the 1990s, these rapes were co-opted by revisionist historians who were attempting to reposition the German people as victims of that war, as opposed to its major instigator.

This is not the only function performed by the rhetoric of ‘perpetrators are victims': it helped alleviate the guilty consciences of individual aggressors. For example, Japanese soldier Kondo Hajime insisted on his victim status when he came forward to testify alongside women who had been forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese Imperial Army after 1937. His motivations were partly compassionate, but they were also an attempt to explain that the soldiers only acted as they did because of extreme cruelty practised against them. Ruthless military training, a starvation diet and heartless senior officers who sent them into combat unprepared were the real villains. Hajime reminded his listeners that ‘our hearts have [also] been tormented...

It was a refrain often heard during the Winter Soldiers' Investigation in early 1971 when 109 American veterans testified about war crimes that they had committed during the conflict in Vietnam. These GIs provided a formidable list of the reasons why they acted in atrocious ways, including racism, peer pressure, fear of being punished by their comrades or senior officers, environmental confusion, retaliation and revenge, lack of training, failures in military leadership and so on. The problems with these excuses for rape were, first, they cannot explain the high levels of violence directed at their own side (after all, 30 per cent of American women who served in Vietnam were raped by their own comrades, as have between 30 and 40 per cent of women in the US military today) and, second, the list of ‘stressors' is so long that sexual atrocities quickly became over-determined. The veterans at the Winter Soldiers' Investigation repeatedly made claims such as ‘I think it's an atrocity on the part of the United States Army' and ‘don't ever let your government do this to you'. The true victims (the raped, tortured and killed) were effectively effaced; the ‘real victims' were the grunts - victims of US government policy.