Sex and International Tribunals: The Erasure of Gender from the War Narrative.

AuthorMontiel, Ruth
PositionBook review

Throughout history, sexual violence has been pervasive in wars, but international humanitarian law has only recently recognized such violence as a crime. Largely as a result of human rights advocacy, international human rights treaties, declarations, and protocols have begun to address the unique issues of rape in armed conflict and gender-based violence as a tool of war. The newly adopted international treaties, declarations, and protocols encourage states to employ an analysis of the role of gender identities in conflict in transitional justice and conflict resolution strategies. The human rights movement has thus made significant strides in bringing a nuanced gender perspective into armed conflict. Unfortunately, transitional justice bodies have not kept pace with these international instruments. (2)

In Sex and International Tribunals: The Erasure of Gender from the War Narrative, Chiseche Salome Mibenge evaluates the failures of international justice mechanisms to provide an effective narrative of gender-based violence. In particular, she focuses on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone (TRC), and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL). She argues that these justice processes have remained mired in the "first tier" of international human rights law.

First tier instruments support formal equality between men and women. They protect women's private roles, namely their biological reproductive potential, but fail to recognize the realities of gender discrimination and the range of identities that women hold. They thus universalize the experience of women. (3) For example, by focusing on the physical pain and biological damage that an individual woman experiences when she is raped, international justice bodies have failed to recognize the long-term social consequences of this violence, such as the damage to their unique roles as caregivers of children. (4) Through a critique of the way that these judicial or quasi-judicial bodies have treated gender-based violence, Mibenge argues that the reduction of women to sexual victims defined solely by their biological capacities fails to recognize the depth and breadth of the harms suffered by both women and men in armed conflict. Such an "essentializing" process only reinforces stereotypes of African men as "abusers" and African women as "victims."

Mibenge argues that the ICTR's treatment of gender-based violence inaccurately creates a narrative that the only true victims of sexual violence are Tutsi women. The Tribunal failed to engage in a thorough analysis of the way...

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