Pamela Scully, Vulnerable Women: a Critical Reflection on Human Rightsdiscourse and Sexual Violence

• Citation: Vol. 23 No. 1
• Publication year: 2009

VULNERABLE WOMEN: A CRITICAL REFLECTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS DISCOURSE AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE

Pamela Scully^*

I write as a historian by training, who is now working on gender, violence, and human rights in contemporary Africa. In this Essay, I hail the great interventions made by women's rights' activists and supporters in placing violence against women on the international human rights agenda, but examine critically the emphasis on female vulnerability in recent UN decisions and documents. I analyze the U.N. Security Council resolutions on the experiences of women in wartime and peace, particularly Resolution 1820. I suggest that an exclusive focus on sexual violence against women and girls limits our ability to understand the root causes of sexual violence, and to build different and sustainable futures for women and men. I explore the implications of the figure of the vulnerable woman for post-conflict reconstruction, arguing that an exclusive focus on sexual violence against women and children leads to the articulation of rights in ways that might actually hinder the objectives of human rights.

We live in awful and wonderful times. We all live with daily violence in our homes and cities. Women live with domestic violence in every country of our world.¹Some citizens of the world live in wartime and deal with a level of terror that is hard to comprehend. Women in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), for example, are being raped multiple times a day, with penises and with gun barrels.²In addition, we know of the systematic raping of women in the Balkan wars of the 1990s,³of the rapes of women during the

Liberian civil war in the 1990s and early 2000s,⁴of what women and children experienced in Sierra Leone,⁵and of the horrors visited by the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda.⁶

As Brownmiller's book, Against Our Will, documented decades ago, rape has always been part of war.⁷But the law and society have tended to regard rape of women in wartime as an unfortunate by-product of war, something that cannot be helped, tied to men's uncontrolled sexual urges.⁸We know of the terrors of the 1990s and today because of the work of women in these countries and outside who speak out against rape in wartime and seek to make it part of the human rights agenda.⁹Thanks to the writings of authors such as Ronda Copelon, Catherine MacKinnon, Ruth Siefert, and others, we now have a much different understanding of rape of women in wartime and particularly with regard to genocide.¹⁰These authors have discussed genocidal rape as a form of abuse tied to the attempted reproduction of particular ethnicities and the killing of others. They have shown how rape is not about lack of control but the very opposite: the controlled use of sex as a weapon.¹¹They have argued that we must understand rape in wartime as connected to much wider patriarchal power relations.¹²

It is thanks to women's activism that violence against women has become part of the human rights agenda through various U.N. Security Council resolutions,¹³that the scope of what counts as sexual violence for the United Nations has widened,¹⁴and that we now have increasing monitoring of gender-based violence around the world.¹⁵The prosecution of rape as a war crime in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and as a crime of genocide in the landmark 1998 Akayesu case in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, have also signaled to governments that the international human rights law community now takes gender-based violence against women seriously when it occurs in the context of genocide and in wartime.¹⁶

In this light, I want briefly to examine the two major Security Council resolutions which have emerged out of this new climate of attention to women's experiences in conflict, and which explicitly focus on women, peace, and security.¹⁷Security Council passed Resolution 1325 in 2000, in the wake of the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the 1994 Rwandan genocide. It is a landmark document: the first resolution ever to focus on women, peace, and security. It notes that women and children are special victims of war, disproportionately represented among refugees and internally displaced people.¹⁸It stresses the need for women to be involved in peacekeeping deliberations and reconstruction efforts and calls for gender mainstreaming in peacekeeping operations.¹⁹Additionally, it calls for the Secretary General to ensure that there are more women staffers in "field-based operations"²⁰as well as at "decision-making levels in conflict resolution and peace processes."²¹

Security Council Resolution 1820 of June 2008 extends the scope of

Resolution 1325. It explicitly addresses sexual violence, and it links sexual violence against women and girls to threats to international peace and security.²²As such, it is a response to what appears to be a new threshold of sexual violence in the wars of the 2000s, as seen in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the DRC. Resolution 1820 resolves that the U.N. Security Council should take steps to "address widespread or systematic sexual violence."²³Among various items, the resolution stresses the need for sexual crimes to always be excluded from any "amnesty provisions in . . . conflict resolution processes,"²⁴and asks the Secretary General "to continue and strengthen efforts to implement the policy of zero tolerance of sexual exploitation and abuse in United Nations peacekeeping operations."²⁵Finally, it demands ongoing reporting on "situations of armed conflict in which sexual violence has been widely or systematically employed against civilians," to develop benchmarks to help stop such violence and to make parties take "appropriate measures to protect women and girls from all forms of sexual violence."²⁶

The rhetoric of the resolutions, particularly 1820, has important implications for women's status in international law and in the spaces of post- conflict reconstruction. Attention to rhetoric is important because people putting programs in place around the world refer to these documents, as well as others in the international arena, to help craft human rights language, even as local actors seek to insert some of their own meaning into that language.²⁷

The language of the resolutions gives me pause. Even given the pioneering nature of the documents, I wonder whether the language and concepts employed by the resolutions in fact help to reproduce older gender stereotypes that frustrate the overarching desire to bring about a sustainable peace for all citizens. Again, I want to emphasize that I write here as an academic, rather than as someone who has to work with what is realistically possible at the U.N. Here, I think it is very helpful to have people who work with and in the U.N. to reflect on how such resolutions are passed and the constraints...