Explaining wartime rape

Journal of Sex Research, May, 2004 by Jonathan Gottschall

In the years since the first reports of mass rapes in the Yugoslavian wars of secession and the genocidal massacres in Rwanda, feminist activists and scholars, human rights organizations, journalists, and social scientists have dedicated unprecedented efforts to document, explain, and seek solutions for the phenomenon of wartime rape. While some researchers argue that the frequency, savagery, and systematic organization of wartime rape increased in late 20th-century conflicts (Barstow, 2000, p. 8; Brownmiller, 1993; Mackinnon, 1994b, p. 75; Sajor, 1998, p. 3), most emphasize the phenomenon's timeless ubiquity, tracing it back to early accounts in the Torah, in Homer, in the Anglo-Saxon chronicles, and in mythological events like the rape of the Sabine women. Researchers are also unified in their belief that the lack of attention to wartime rape by scholars and international courts represents a serious dereliction of moral and intellectual duty (e.g., Sajor, 1998, p. 2; Thomas & Regan, 1994). Most importantly, these writers agree that the only way to attack the problem of wartime rape is to identify and understand the factors and conditions that promote it (for representative samples of this literature see contributors to Barstow, 2000; contributors to Dombrowski, 1999; contributors to Sajor, 1998; contributors to Stiglmayer, 1994).

On this most critical issue, however, the consensus in the literature wavers. While there is significant agreement on some of the causal factors for wartime rape, there is no unified theory that can bring coherence to all the information associated with it. There are presently four leading theories for the prevalence of wartime rape. I will refer to these hereafter as the feminist theory, the cultural pathology theory, the strategic rape theory, and the biosocial theory. While the first three theories emphasize different causal factors for wartime rape, they are firmly unified in their ability to decisively rule out sexual desire as a major causal factor. Moreover, proponents of the first three theories generally contend that rape in war is the result of social and cultural influences particular to given types of societies, and argue against explanations based upon "human nature." These theories differ only in the identification of which sociocultural factors are most responsible. On the other hand, the biosocial theory suggests that researchers must consider not only sociocultural factors but also the evolved sexual psychology of human males, and it emphasizes that sexual desire is likely to be a primary influence on a soldier's decision to rape.

The fundamental test of any theory is its ability to explain and bring coherence to information. A favored theory accounts for more information more economically than its rivals. Theories also generate expectations about how phenomena should be organized if the theory is valid; a favored theory is one whose logically derived expectations are satisfied more fully than those generated by its rivals. This paper evaluates each of the four major theories of wartime rape according to the following criteria: first, descriptive power (is there good "theory/data fit?") and second, parsimony (does the theory account for information with the fewest numbers of assumptions and posits?)

Before evaluating the four theories of wartime rape, however, it is necessary to establish the information base against which these theories will be judged. The following section provides a short overview of consensus knowledge about wartime rape.

BACKGROUND ON WARTIME RAPE

First, the term wartime rape, as it is employed in the literature, never indicates isolated examples of rape by individual fighters. Rather, the term is used interchangeably with mass wartime rape to indicate distinct patterns of rape by soldiers at rates that are much increased over rates of rape that prevail in peacetime. While there are no reliable statistics on wartime rape due to the reporting biases of the opposing sides and the reluctance of victims to come forward, these increases can range from the calculated 300% to 400% increases over American civilian rape rates that accompanied American breakouts in France and Germany toward the end of World War II (Morris, 2000, p. 170) to rates of increase that likely reached into the thousands in the weeks after the Red Army first swept into Berlin and committed between 20,000 and 100,000 rapes (Brownmiller, 1975; Ryan, 1966; Siefert, 1994). Incidentally, these figures represent good examples of the mushiness of wartime rape statistics: The American figures are almost certainly underestimated because they are based solely on rapes reported to authorities, and estimates of the number of Red Army rapes in Berlin climb as high as 1,000,000 (Grossman, 1999, p. 164). A partial list of countries that have been identified as loci of mass rapes conducted by military or paramilitary forces just in the 20th century includes Belgium and Russia during World War I; Russia, Japan, Italy, Korea, China, the Philippines, and Germany during World War II; and in one or more conflicts, Afghanistan, Algeria, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Burma, Bosnia, Cambodia, Congo, Croatia, Cyprus, East Timor, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Kuwait, Kosovo, Liberia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Peru, Pakistan, Rwanda, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Turkey, Uganda, Vietnam, Zaire, and Zimbabwe. (1)