“The UN Security Council has voted unanimously in favour of a resolution classifying rape as a weapon of war. The document describes the deliberate use of rape as a tactic in war and a threat to international security. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said violence against women had reached ‘unspeakable proportions’ in some societies recovering from conflict. The UN is also setting up an inquiry to report next June on how widespread the practice is and how to tackle it. Human rights groups hailed the resolution as historic. The BBC’s Laura Trevelyan said China, Russia, Indonesia and Vietnam had all expressed reservations during the negotiations, asking whether rape was really a matter for the security council…. ‘It’s a very effective weapon, because the communities are totally destroyed,’ he said. ‘You destroy communities. You punish the men, and you punish the women, doing it in front of the men.’ In the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, some 40 women are raped every day, our correspondent says. Sometimes women are even raped by peacekeepers who are supposed to be protecting them, she adds. The question is whether those in conflict zones who use rape in war will be at all deterred by the new measures, she says.” — BBC (UK)

(Thanks for the link to Chad from Sunderland, who wrote that “giving it a ‘war tactic’ status may make it more of an excusable thing in times of war. They should change its status back to RAPE, pure and simple. Anyone guilty of it, whether during a war or not, should recieve the highest possible punishment for that crime.”)

To declare rape a “war tactic” is rather like declaring murder a war tactic. Of course it’s a war tactic. Where there is war, there is sexual violence. You can read about it in the most ancient works of history. Although a modern scholar asserts that “it is by no means clear that the Greeks had a conception of rape at all similar to ours,” Herodotus describes how Persian soldiers murdered some Phocian women “with the multitude of those that raped them.” (Herodotus 8.33) It half makes you wonder if the first wars were fought less for territory or gold than for tail. Helen was the object of dispute in the Trojan war. What stronger motivation could there be for killing than fucking? Or to look at it another way, how better inspire men to kill for an abstraction — the state — than to offer them the most concrete reward of all?

Evidently the point of declaring rape a “war tactic” is to say that it’s something more than a “boys will be boys” thing. It’s a deliberate means of subjugating and humiliating an enemy. That makes sense — but wouldn’t it make even more sense to declare it not a war tactic but a war crime? After all, soldiers and leaders can be arrested for war crimes. But who’s ever been hauled into a world court for a war tactic? Nobody. It’s difficult to see how this resolution will have the slighest effect except possibly to make the military more appealing to the very men who dream of rape.

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