Silence and Speaking

Throughout the world in the past two centuries, victims and witnesses have been reluctant to come forward. Victims know that reporting sexual assault will be an ordeal. They fear publicity and the likelihood of retaliation.

They dread having to undergo humiliating police questioning and uncomfortable genital examinations. In some contexts, they faced hostile jurors or, even worse, judges who guffawed during their testimony. Many were promised anonymity, only to discover that their names were publicised. Certain types of victims were routinely discriminated against. Thus, prostitutes, peddlers, domestic workers and immigrant groups are generally correct when they believe that their complaints will be ignored. Victims fall silent, ashamed of their own violation.

Protesting against sexual violence is also difficult for members of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities. Male victims sometimes become aroused, further complicating issues of compliance. Ejaculation is used as evidence of pleasure, even when levels of brutality have been extreme. Male victims often fear that being attacked in a sexual way is emasculating. Victims with a heterosexual orientation worry that they might be labelled homosexual or lesbian: perhaps they ‘unconsciously wanted it'. In other words, homophobia is a powerful disincentive to reporting both male-on-male and female-on-female abuse. Reporting sexual assault - ‘washing our dirty linen in public' - also provokes alarm within LGBT communities, anxious that they will be further stigmatised. It is not an unrealistic fear: as late as 1973, the American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a disorder, as did the World Health Organization until 1992. Today, more than seventy countries criminalise sexual activity by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex people.

In fact, silence might be the preferred option for those victims keen not to humiliate their own communities.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jewish women who had been sexually abused by fellow prisoners (such as Kapos or Funktionshaftling) in labour and extermination camps were often speechless. Admitting to having been raped in the camps was akin to testifying to gendered suffering. Their abuse was not a shared experience that could be employed to reconstitute communities, but a sexed violation in which Prisoners were not pitted against Nazis but Women against Men. The failure of one's community of men to protect ‘their' women was humiliating for all concerned.

In times of armed conflict, the relative silence of rape victims might also be due to the fact that it was simply one of many vicious assaults on their bodies and minds - and perhaps not the worst. A stark example of this can be seen in Rwanda. Between the second week of April and the third week of May 1994, mass rape was routine, but it occurred in a context where between 5 and 10 per cent of the country's population was slaughtered. Survival took place against great odds.

Victims routinely struggle to find words for their suffering. In many cultures (such as Mexico in the nineteenth century), they faced assumptions that only shameless women would talk publicly about sexual matters. Frequently, the language of sexual violence was itself deeply problematic. In Kinyarwanda, for example, the word used to refer to sexual violence was kubohoza, meaning ‘to help liberate'. The term had initially referred to the act of coercing Rwandans to change political parties, but was applied during the 1994 genocide to the rape of girls and women.^{^[200]} In Rwandan courts, the Kinyarwanda phrase ‘gufata ku ngufu', meaning ‘to take by force, to rape', was obscure to most witnesses, who consequently preferred using indirect languages and metaphors, including ‘we got married'.^{^[201]}

In wartime, in particular, accounts of rape projected powerful messages about national identity and ideology.

As a result, censorship was rife. In the Soviet Union, East Germany and Hungary following the Second World War, it was only after the collapse of communism that many people felt able to talk about what they had done or experienced. Tight controls over the press and mass media had ensured that their stories had to be buried. In many communist states, governments had promoted an idealised version of history in which the Red Army liberated (rather than victimised) populations. When rape was discussed - as in Hungary - it was often as a political attack on communism. For many Hungarian Jews and others, the image of a rapacious Red Army was dismissed as a myth propagated by conservative, nationalist commentators who sought to ‘marginalize the importance of Fascism and the Holocaust for Hungary'.^{^[202]} Throughout the globe, justice systems were found to be incompetent, corrupt or even sympathetic to perpetrators. The perpetrators might be the government or other state agents.

A further problem lies in proving ‘lack of consent'. It is generally assumed that the victim has to prove that she did not consent, rather than the accused proving that she did. Whether it is the Nguyen Penal Code in Vietnam, which required corroboration by witnesses and physical injury, or the famous instruction given to jurors in Britain and the USA that ‘a charge of rape is easily to be made and hard to be proved and even harder to be defended', accusers generally have to provide irrefutable physical evidence of having vigorously resisted in order to be believed.

Finally, if the court case is not proven beyond doubt, rape accusations can rebound dramatically on the woman herself. Unsuccessful complainants in Darfur can be charged with zena or adultery, which is punishable with imprisonment or a public whipping.^{^[203]} The Hudood Ordinances in Pakistan include rape under zina (adultery/fornication) offences. If a prosecution for zina-bil-jabr (rape) fails, the accuser can be treated as having confessed to adultery, and punished by public lashings or even stoning to death.^{^[204]} Is it any wonder that many victims preferred to ‘bury their dishonour', as rape victims during the war in the former Yugoslavia put it, rather than seek redress?^{^[205]} ^{^[206]}

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Source: Edwards Louise, Penn Nigel, Winter Jay (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 4: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 676 p.. 2020

Silence and Speaking

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