(I knew my International law class would be good for something.

The international legal definition of the crime of genocide is found in Articles II and III of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.

Article II describes two elements of the crime of genocide:

1) the mental element, meaning the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such", and

2) the physical element which includes five acts described in sections a, b, c, d and e. A crime must include both elements to be called "genocide."

So. Why is rage Genocide? Because it can be used to "breed" out an ethnicity. Also, in some countries the rape of a woman may lead to her family putting her to death, 'honor killing' and all that, therefor the number of women availible to continue the "a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" may have been greatly diminished.

Some key wording in the above definition is "in part." You may not want to kill off all of an ethnic group, just those who live in your town or countryside.

That is all I can give you without going back to my international law text book (which I may have sold at a horroble discount back to the uni book store).

Hope that helps

One thing that is linked to rape and war is the tendency to increase in prostitutes and brothels around military bases.

One book I've read "the natashas" deals mostly with trafficing, but it allso has a lot to say about increase in trafficing towards places with us and nato army bases in foreign countries.

It is a disturbing book.

There has allso been some stories in the news the last few years about UN soldiers abusing under aged prostitutes.

I feel that cases such as these are intimatly linked to rape in the more traditional sense.

Steven commented at July 24, 2008 12:40 PM: "So. Why is rage [you meant "rape," not "rage," right?] Genocide? Because it can be used to 'breed' out an ethnicity. Also, in some countries the rape of a woman may lead to her family putting her to death, 'honor killing' and all that, therefor the number of women availible to continue the 'a national, ethnical, racial or religious group' may have been greatly diminished."

I just realized that both of these are genocidal tactics relying on the attacked community's leaders to finish the job themselves.

Rape's more likely to "breed out" a group if the group's leaders count babies conceived by outsiders raping insiders as outsiders than if they accept the babies as new members of the group.

Rape also reduces the number of women available in a group even faster if the group's leaders shun and kill female rape survivors in the group than if they sympathize with and support female rape survivors in the group.

Thanks everyone for posting. I'm pretty good with the international law part and making connections to why rape is used in genocide campaigns, I'm mostly looking for literature on the subject. Does anyone know of any scholars that have written on this subject? There's a number of things on Bosnia but I'm trying to establish this as something that occurs in many genocide campaigns like in Rwanda and Sudan. Trying to establish this as something that has been/is being carried out systematically and isn't just a byproduct of war and ethnic violence.

Thanks.

You might want to try some kind of truth commission work. It may give you some kind of statistics on rape during genocide and war. There have been quite a few truth commissions to date (I think it's around 30, though many have not been particularly successful) and the writings on these often have very good information from the perpetrators themselves and sometimes, the victims, too.

The best book I've read on truth commissions was called "Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenges of a Truth Commission" by Priscilla Hayner. It was very informative on the processes and expectations of what a truth commission is and how they are generally done. It won't give you much information in the way of stats, but if you do decide to go that route, it can help explain a lot of what happens during a truth commission.

Other than that, maybe Amnesty International reports might help or other sorts of international reporting systems.

Best of luck! This sounds like a fascinating, depressing and very important subject.

*steven tag-in in on wowcabbage's comment*

If you are not familiar with truth commissions the full name is "truth and reconciliation commissions".

That might help you narrow/focus your searches.

There is not a TRC yet for Sudan as the conflict is ongoing, but info is out there on Bosnia TRC.

*steven tags out, wishing he still had time to watch wrestling*

Thanks, I'll use that for stats.

Hi RiotGrrl -

There are actually several academic works out there regarding rape and genocide. I wrote a paper on this myself, and off the top of my head here are a few I remember:

Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia by Beverly Allen

Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina by Roy Gutman (Gutman also wrote a number of stories for Newsday on during the wars in Yugoslavia)

Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape by Susan Brownmiller

This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace by Swanee Hunt

As mentioned above, in the context of the conflict in Yugoslavia (although this argument can be made for most cases of genocidal rape), the theory was that rape was a way of erasing the identity of the woman being raped (particularly if the woman became pregnant as a result of that rape - because then she would be carrying a child with the heritage of the rapist).

The resources are out there - if your school has agreements with searchable online academic databases, I'd suggest you start there.

If you need more help, let me know I'd be happy to share with you my paper's full bibliography.

thanks Genie. Some of those I'm familiar with but there are a couple there I'll be looking up.