What Is ‘Sexual Violence'?

There have been important shifts in the weighting given to the two compo­nents of ‘sexual violence'. For many people and for much of history, empha­sis has been placed on the ‘sexual' nature of sexual violence: it was a heinous crime because it attacked the purity, decency and honour of girls and women.

There have also been concerns about those problematic categories of ‘victims' and ‘perpetrators'? I will be referring to targets of violence as ‘victims' despite the fact that in recent decades a certain strand of feminist thought prefers to call them ‘survivors'. I do this because many ‘victims' did not survive, and many ‘survivors' insist that they are ‘victims', however much they repudiate the passivity that is often attached to that term.

In exploring these issues on a global scale the first question to ask is: who is entitled to label something as ‘sexually violent'? For centuries, male-biased legal and penal systems have taken the task of deciding whether a sexual assault or rape has taken place or not. The patois of perpetrators has echoed loudly through time, insisting upon their rights to define and delimitate what is legitimate and illegitimate aggression. The claims of abused children, women and men have been routinely questioned, if not disparaged, silenced and suppressed. Paying attention to all these voices is important if we are to understand not only the struggles of people in the past, but equally the meaning of violence itself.

Admittedly, attempting to compose a global history of sexual violence presents formidable challenges. Global analyses of any phenomenon are necessarily reductive. When the timeframe extends over two centuries (in this chapter, the nineteenth century to the present), there is also a risk of emphasising similarities over differences. This must be resisted. The abducted peasant women of Ireland or central Europe have little in common with date-raped sophomores in America; the girls and women violated by Red Army soldiers in 1945 cannot reliably be compared to women who acquiesce to sexual intercourse with their husbands as the ‘easier option'. It matters if you are a boy or man. It makes a difference if the attacker wields a machete or waves an employment contract. Terror is always local; uni- versalist assumptions insult the specificities of individual histories. Sexual violence is deeply rooted in specific political, economic, social and cultural contexts.

The fluidity of definitions of sexual violence is particularly evident in legal spheres. Depending on the time period and territorial jurisdictions, legal characterisations of sexual violence may be based on either evidence of extreme physical coercion or lack of explicit consent to sexual intercourse. Both violence and consent have histories. In some countries, and during certain periods of history, only girls and women can be raped and there has to be proof of penile penetration of a vagina as well as evidence of emission of semen. Elsewhere, the gender of both victims and perpetrators is irrelevant and a wide range of acts are accepted as sexually abusive. In jurisdictions prioritising consent, age is important. Sexual activity with ‘a minor' (that is, a person who has not reached a designated stage of maturity) is by definition ‘violent'. This, too, can change with startling rapidity. In England and Wales, for instance, the age of consent was raised from 12 to 13 in 1875, then, scarcely ten years later, to 16 years. Having sexual intercourse with girls below those ages was outlawed. Similarly, in the USA, the age of consent in most states in the 1880s was 10 years. In 1889, Congress revised the statutory age in the District of Columbia to 16 years. By the end of the nineteenth century, the difference between the ages in which a girl's ‘yes' was legally deemed to be meaningful could be as young as 10 in Mississippi and Alabama and as old as 18 in Kansas and Wyoming. Throughout the globe, such variations were linked to ideas about the onset of puberty, different expectations of child­hood, shifting views about the innocence or culpability of infants and youth, and the strength of feminist and other activist movements.

If the fluidity of definitions is one problem, the dearth of evidence is another. The difficulties in assessing the extent of sexual violence are legion. We don't know how many people perpetrated acts of sexual violence; we don't know how many were victims.

Rapists know that what they are doing is wrong. They routinely beg victims not to tell anyone. They feel embarrassed, ashamed and guilty. Many seek solace in alcohol, drugs and other numbing substances. Such reactions suggest that sexual violence is not an esteemed masculine trait, but its opposite.

Victims as well as whistle-blowers often find that they are not believed. This is usually due to denial and mistrust of the victims, but it is also because rape accusations have often been used to serve ulterior political functions. The propaganda value of rape accusations is extremely high in times of war. During the First World War, for example, the Allies deliberately spread rumours about the ‘rapes committed by the Hun' in an attempt to persuade the US government to commit troops to the war effort. This also happened during the crisis in the former Yugoslavia where every side made use of rape propaganda: the Serbian press vilified Croat and Muslim men as orientalised rapists while the Croatian and Bosnian media did the same to the Serbs. In the words of gender scholar Dubravka Zarkov, ‘raped women became flags waved by the warring parties'.^[199]