The Curious Visibility of Wartime Rape: Gender and Ethnicity in International Criminal Law

Abstract

Wartime sexual violence against women has become a clearly visible and established issue of concern in the emerging international criminal apparatus. But what is it that we see when we make violence against women visible as an international criminal law issue? Are there limits to the strategy of seeing women, and the human rights abuses they suffer, within the work of war crimes tribunals? In this paper, I focus on the Yugoslav and Rwandan Tribunals as venues at which violence against women has been remarkably visible. I consider two decisions, Gacumbitsi and Krstić, one from each of the Tribunals, that reveal the ways in which sexual violence and inequality are both seen and unseen in the Tribunals' analyses. I focus, in particular, on the intersection of gender and ethnicity in the work of the Tribunals, and question if ethnicity may be emerging as a meta-narrative within which sexual violence against women materializes in constrained and limited ways.