Saturday, June 21, 2008

Why is rape used as a weapon of war in the first place?

From a perspective of pure heartless military strategy with no consideration for human decency whatsoever, why is rape worth using as a weapon of war? It seems really inefficient to me. Even if everyone has premature ejaculation issues, it's still faster and easier to just kill someone than to rape them.

At first I thought it was just to satisfy the soldiers' sexual needs, but if you read about it in wretched gory detail, they're actually putting way more time and energy and effort into war-crime rape than they'd need if it was for their own sexual satisfaction.

I also thought it might be for the purpose of terrorizing the population, but again, you can terrorize the population by killing large numbers of people, and that would be a far faster and easier.

So who decided, and on what basis, that war-crime rape was a good use of time and resources and manpower from a military strategy point of view?

5 comments:

Fran said...

It was repeatedly stressed in my sociology courses that rape is not about sex to any significant degree.

It's much more a crime of power and control -- it's assault, degradation, humiliation, torture, etc.

A couple of times during my college years, there were reported rapes and the police warned that the alleged rapist probably was a student or ex-student who lived on or near campus. It turned out the person who was later charged and convicted was much older and not from campus, but the report that he was 'on the loose' did a pretty efficient job of terrorizing the population until he was arrested.

impudent strumpet said...

In terms of his own time and resource expenditure, it would still have been more efficient for him to just shoot people. Rape is more time-consuming than shooting a gun.

I guess whether it's worth doing as a tool of degradation/humilation depends on what the army sees as its primary mission. If their primary mission is to degrade and humiliate the oppressed population it might be a worthwhile use of their manpower. But isn't their primary mission to gain and hold control of more land and resources, i.e. marching around and taking stuff over and killing the opposing army? If that's what they're trying to do, it seems strategically unsound to devote so much manpower to systematic rape.

Fran said...

I think rape is seldom a systemic military strategy. Most people aren't rapists, even if they are ordered to do so. It is deviant behavior, even moreso than killing, I think. In a war situation, it is sometimes 'kill or be killed.' I don't think it's rape be raped very often.

Also, I think it's probably easier to 'take over stuff' when the population is frightened. I hope never to find out, but I can imagine thinking someone is going to come back and rape you is as bad or worse as thinking they're going to come back and kill you.

laura k said...

To terrorize and demoralize the population, to humiliate the male population who couldn't protect "their" women, to dominate, to show they "own" the population, that the population is under their control.

You can think of it as sexual vandalism - wreck the house, loot the contents, rape the women. You can also think of it as using sex as a weapon of violence.

To know more about this, I recommend the chapter on rape in war in Susan Brownmiller's "Against Our Will".

Like Fran says, it has nothing to do with sex.

I think rape is seldom a systemic military strategy.

This is incorrect, unfortunately. Mass rapes in war time have been very common, and they've been premeditated attacks.

laura k said...

Another thought.

I also thought it might be for the purpose of terrorizing the population, but again, you can terrorize the population by killing large numbers of people, and that would be a far faster and easier.

In some sense, mass rapes terrorize the population even more than mass killing, because the victims live on to remember the terror, as well as often becoming compliant (because they are depressed, beaten). Killing men and raping women would seem like the perfect combo for terror.

Sometimes mass rapes also tie into cultural taboos. In cultures where a raped women is shunned or disowned, the rape may be worse than death. In Bosnia, soldiers tried to impregnate Muslim women with "Christian sperm". So there were additional levels of horror going on.