A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PROSECUTION OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE AS AN INTERNATIONAL CRIME

Rape and sexual enslavement has been considered for centuries not only as a natural part of war, but in some cases, as part of a romanticized version of war. The Iliad depicts a war in ancient Greece, rooted in a conflict between two military leaders over a captured and enslaved enemy woman. Many classical paintings depicting wartime and the atrocities that occurred during war included rape. As the Soviet army moved westward onto German territory in early 1945, large numbers of women were raped. Also during that time, German troops occupying Eastern Europe raped girls and women of various ethnicities and organized brothels in labor and concentration camps. Extensive sexual violence also occurred in the Pacific theater during World War II. The invasion of Nanking became known as the Rape of Nanking, using rape not just as a metaphor, but also because the Japanese troops committed rape against the civilian Chinese population on a massive scale. Following this was the widespread implementation of the so-called “comfort women” who comprised more than 200,000 women from across East and Southeast Asia, mostly Korean, recruited by force to serve as on-call prostitutes to the Japanese soldiers. Most recently, rape has become a commonly accepted “weapon of war,” employed as a tactic to attack and terrorize civilian populations. Sexual violence has played an important role in the conflicts in Rwanda and the Balkans during the early 1990s, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Darfur, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

One of the first explicit prohibitions against rape was the Lieber Code, enacted during the American Civil War by President Lincoln to outline the conduct of Union soldiers. Among the prohibitions was that against rape which was punishable by the military commanders who could execute a soldier if that person committed a prohibited act. However, since then, the body of international law of war, which sovereign states had been assembling since the 1860s, has largely neglected rape. Most laws implicitly prohibited rape rather than prohibiting it outright. For example, the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907 implied such a prohibition as respect for and protection of “family honor and rights.”