Armed Groups and Sexual Violence: When Is Wartime Rape Rare?

• DOI: 10.1177/0032329208329755
• Date: 01 March 2009
• Author: Elisabeth Jean Wood
• Published date: 01 March 2009
• Subject Matter: Articles

Armed Groups and Sexual Violence:

When Is Wartime Rape Rare?*

ELISABETH JEAN WOOD

This article explores a particular pattern of wartime violence, the relative

absence of sexual violence on the part of many armed groups. This neglectedfact

has important policy implications: If some groups do not engage in sexual vio-

lence, then rape is not inevitable in war as is sometimes claimed, and there are

stronger grounds for holding responsible those groups that do engage in sexual

violence. After developing a theoretical framework for understanding the

observed variation in wartime sexual violence, the article analyzes the puzzling

absence of sexual violence on the part of the secessionist Liberation Tigers of

Tamil Eelam of Sri Lanka.

Keywords: sexual violence; rape; political violence; human rights; war

131

I am grateful for research support from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the United

States Institute of Peace, the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies of Yale

University, and the Santa Fe Institute; for research assistance from Margaret Alexander, Emma

Einhorn, Sashini Jayawardane, Tim Taylor, and Kai Thaler; and for comments from Patrick Ball,

Jeffrey Burds, Dara Kay Cohen, Neloufer de Mel, Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín, Shireen Hasshim,

Amelia Hoover, Macartan Humphreys, Matthew Kocher, Michele Leiby, Jason Lyall, Meghan

Lynch, Eric Mvukiyehe, Nick Smith, WilliamStanley, Jessica Stanton, and Wendy Pearlman. I also

benefited from comments by seminar participants at the Comparative Politics Workshop of

Columbia University, the HarvardAcademy for International and Area Studies, the Peace Research

Institute of Oslo, and the editorial board of Politics & Society. The opinions, findings, and conclu-

sions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily

reflect the views of the United States Institute of Peace.

POLITICS & SOCIETY,Vol. 37 No. 1, March 2009 131-162

DOI: 10.1177/0032329208329755

© 2009 Sage Publications

*This article is part of a special section of Politics & Society on the topic “patterns of wartimesexual violence.”

The papers were presented at the workshop Sexual Violence duringWar held at Yale University in November

2007. For more information, please refer to the introduction to this section.

The frequency of rape of civilians and other forms of sexual violence varies

dramatically across conflicts, armed groups within conflict, and units within

armed groups.1The form of sexual violence also varies, including rape of

women and girls and also of men and boys, sexual torture, forced pregnancies,

and abortion.2Yet with some exceptions, the literature on wartime sexual vio-

lence focuses on cases where the pattern of sexual violence represents one end

of the observed spectrum, namely, widespread rape of civilian girls and women,

as in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone.

Common explanations for wartime reflect that emphasis: Rape is an effec-

tive strategy of war, particularly of ethnic cleansing; rape is one form of atroc-

ity and occurs alongside other atrocities; war provides the opportunity for

widespread rape, and many if not all male soldiers will take advantage of it.

Yet in the repertoire of violence of armed groups, rape occurs in sharply vary-

ing proportions to other forms of violence against civilians; in some cases the

ratio is relatively high, in others very low. Many armed groups, including

some state militaries, leftist insurgent groups, and secessionist ethnic groups,

do not engage in widespread rape despite frequent interaction with civilians

on otherwise intimate terms. Indeed, some armed groups engage in ethnic

cleansing—the classic setting for widespread rape—without engaging in sexual

violence.

Thus this article explores a particular pattern of sexual violence: the relative

absence of wartime sexual violence by one or more armed groups. This

absence is particularly striking when it is one-sided. This neglected fact has

important policy implications: If some groups do not engage in sexual violence,

then rape is not inevitable in war as is sometimes claimed, and there are

stronger grounds for holding responsible those groups that do engage in sexual

violence.

I begin by defining a number of terms, raising some conceptual prob-

lems with those terms, and addressing a few caveats. Focusing on sexual

violence against civilians with only passing reference to patterns of sexual

violence within armed groups, I then argue that candidate explanations for

the absence of wartime sexual violence do not account for the absence of

sexual violence by some groups. After developing a theoretical framework for

understanding patterns of wartime sexual violence, I elaborate the observable

implications of the framework for cases where rape is absent or strikingly

rare. In light of this framework, I then describe the patterns of sexual violence

in the Sri Lankan conflict, focusing on the apparent rarity of sexual violence

on the part of the Tamil secessionist group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil

Eelam (LTTE). In the conclusion, I very briefly discuss the absence of sexual

violence on the part of insurgents in El Salvador, as well as the evolving pattern

of sexual violence in the repertoires of armed groups in Peru and in KwaZulu

Natal, South Africa.

132 POLITICS & SOCIETY

DEFINITIONS, CLARIFICATIONS, AND CAVEATS

By repertoireof violence, I mean the violent subset of what CharlesTilly calls

the repertoire of contention,3namely, that set of practices that a group routinely

engages in as it makes claims on other political or social actors. A particular

group may include in its repertoire any or all of the following: kidnapping,

assassinations, massacres, torture, sexual violence, forced displacement, and so

on. By rape, I mean the penetration of the anus or vagina with any object or

body part or of any body part of the victim or perpetrator’s body with a sexual

organ, by force or by threat of force or coercion, or by taking advantage of a

coercive environment, or against a person incapable of giving genuine consent.4

Sexual violence is a broader category that includes rape, sexual torture and muti-

lation, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, enforced sterilization, and forced

pregnancy.5By the absence of sexual violence, I mean that sexual violence is

very rare but not necessarily entirely absent. Throughout, by armed group, I

mean both state militaries and nonstate armed actors.

Of course the observed absence of sexual violence in a conflict or by a par-

ticular group might reflect our ignorance of its actual occurrence rather than a

true absence.There are many reasons thatrape and other forms of sexual violence

are underreported in wartime.6It is not reasonable to assume that it is underre-

ported to the same degree across conflicts, parties, and regions: The conditions

promoting the reporting of sexual violence, including the resources available to

humanrights and women’s groups,vary radically.And the degreeof underreporting

varies as well with the form of sexual violence: Rape, particularly rape of males,

is likely less reported thanother forms in most settings. Nonetheless, the extreme

variation in the incidence of sexual violence across conflicts and groups,

together with the existence of well-documented low-incidence cases, suggests

that there are cases of relatively low sexual violence: Not all the apparent

absence is an artifact of our ignorance.7For example, it is unlikely that the

apparent absence of sexual violence in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict reflects

underreporting, given the scrutiny of violence there by domestic human rights

groups and international actors.

That said,it can be very difficult—and indeed, mistaken—toinfer the frequency

of sexual violence from reports of human rights and women’s organizations. The

frequency and type of incidents reported areshaped by oft-notedfactors such asthe

willingnessof victims to talk, the resourcesavailable, whetherforensic authorities

record signs of sexual violence, and the regional and partisan bias of the organi-

zation. In addition, the description of sexual violence as “widespread” and “sys-

tematic” may reflect an organization’s attempt to draw resources to document

sexual violence (whatever its actual level) rather than the frequency of incidents

per se, or may reflect legal rather than social science concepts. And in settings

where political violenceis ongoing, organizations may feel it prudent to statethat

ELISABETH JEAN WOOD 133