For centuries, women’s movements around the world have made sexual assault, especially rape, a central concern. In Russia, the mid-nineteenth-century women nihilists and the revolutionary feminist Alexandra Kollontai even advocated absolute equality in love and sex; they created alternative forms of relationships, from loveless, sexless fictitious marriages that allowed women unusual independence from their parents and social expectations to extramarital serial monogamy (Noonan and Nechemias 2001, 47). In the West, the issue of rape gained new prominence in the second wave of women’s activism in the 1970s and 1980s. In the United States and the United Kingdom, along with the proliferation of rape crisis centers came Take Back the Night/Reclaim the Night marches that revealed atrocities and made new claims upon the state. But the resurgence of the issue was not reserved for the Global North. For example, rape also became a key issue for Indian women’s movements, while in Brazil women’s organizations linked sexual violence to state repression, getting the newly installed civilian government to create special police stations to assist women who had suffered from
sexual violence (Basu 1995, 11—12). The consolidation of the concept of “violence against women” provided a way to connect these concerns, helping activists from the Global North to overcome claims that they were only a middle-class white movement and those from the Global South to undermine assertions of violence as cultural practice (Weldon 2006). When activists succeeded in getting violence against women included into U. N. documents in the 1980s and 1990s, rape was explicitly included (see appendix 1).
The central innovation in the global feminist consensus was the global recognition of the use of rape in war. Even at the Nuremberg and Tokyo war trials following World War II, the systematic deployment of rape during war had been ignored. In the aftermath of mass rapes of women by Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait in 1991 and by Serb forces in Bosnia in 1993, transnational feminists working with human rights activists created enough pressure that key perpetrators were brought to trial for their policy of raping Bosnian women and that such rapes were reclassified as crimes against humanity. This politicization of war rape also led to the creation of the second postsocialist women’s crisis center in 1990, the Belgrade SOS hotline (Corrin 1996) (the first was founded in Zagreb in 1987). That the human rights community had to be persuaded to take seriously rape in war, the most public and visibly violent form of rape, revealed the hypocrisy in the widespread formal condemnation of rape. In practice, while officially criminalizing rape, most societies limit rape prosecutions to “honorable” victims and to only certain forms of forced sex.1 These “real rapes” differ from the more widespread and often ignored “simple rapes” between those who know each other and where less explicit force (outside the rape itself) is employed (Estrich 1987). Most societies have been quite skeptical of women’s actual assertions of rape.
In 2002, the Special Rapporteur on violence against women to the High Commission on Human Rights issued the boldest critique of rapes outside of war.2 Whereas U. N. documents had condemned rape without specifying what constituted rape, this report condemned marital rape, honor killings of raped family members, gang rapes of lower-caste women by upper-caste men, forced marriages (including those through rape), the exoneration of rapists if they agree to marry the woman they rape, incest, and the punishment or abuse of women who transgress boundaries of what is accepted as appropriate sexual behavior. While the other condemnations of rape met with widespread and facile support, this report evoked far more outcry because it “moved into a new domain of behavior, that of sexuality and its regulation, and challenged cultural practices considered acceptable by at least some members of societies” (Merry 2006a, 62—65). Official representatives from many South Asian countries were disgruntled, some even hostile, as the report claimed that the international community had the right to challenge societies’ regulation of women’s sexuality and family life, issues that had not necessarily been raised by the more pedestrian statements on rape and sexual abuse. The critiques also provoked resistance because they “resonated with colonial critiques of family and gender practices, ranging from assaults on sati to child marriage” (65).