All posts tagged child abuse

Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict @ the Imperial War Museum

This exhibition includes cases of rape, sexual humiliation, torture and child abuse in conflict. Imperial War Museum advises that this exhibition is only suitable for those aged 16 or over.

This is a really important exhibition on a very important subject. Most exhibitions stimulate or entertain me but this one significantly changed my understanding and attitude towards a horrific and ongoing crisis.

‘Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict’ is the UK’s first major exhibition dedicated to describing, analysing and understanding sexual violence in conflict. It includes 162 objects which illustrate all aspects of the issue, from wartime propaganda posters to testimonies from women victims from the First and Second World wars, as well as more recent conflicts such as Yugoslavia, Darfur and Congo, Gaza and Ukraine.

Expert views

The first and last galleries house no objects, just video screens which feature interviews with experts in the field. In the first room they introduce key facts and concepts around sexual violence in conflict, including the term itself and its definition, what it means, who perpetrates it, and who the victims are. In the final room, the same experts suggest ways to bring about change. These experts are:

Charu Lata Hogg – founder and Executive Director of All Survivors Project
Dr Zeynep Kaya – Lecturer in International Relations, University of Sheffield
Dr Paul Kirby – Queen Mary University
Christina Lamb – Sunday Times journalist and author of ‘Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women’
Sarah Sands – journalist and former Chair of the G7 Gender Equality Advisory Council

Why sexual violence in conflict has gone unreported

According to the experts, sexual violence has accompanied conflict and war for as long as we have records.

Wherever conflict erupts, sexual violence is present.
(Sara Bowcutt, Women for Women International)

For most of history it has been repressed and unrecorded, for numerous reasons.

Until the advent of photography and, nowadays, smartphones and social media, it’s been difficult to document and record.
This has led to sexual violence being under-reported at the time and so all but ignored in official records and historical accounts.
Perpetrators and the bodies they serve in (armies, militias, informal groups), wanting to preserve their ‘honour’ and prestige, suppress information.
But victims, families of victims, their communities and wider societies sometimes cover it up because of the ‘shame’ and social stigma attached.

But there are other occasions when sexual violence is the opposite of hushed up, when it is used to terrorise and demoralise civilian populations, with a view to depriving fighting forces of support or bringing pressure on them to surrender and end the abuse of their civilian communities. This was practiced in Darfur and more recently by Russian forces in occupied areas of Ukraine. In these situations incidents of sexual violence are widely advertised – but the challenge remains the same: of identifying the exact perpetrators, and trying to establish who in the chain of command gave authorisation for it. This can be frustratingly difficult to achieve.

Why it’s important to discuss sexual violence in conflict

The stance of this exhibition is that the subject must be directly addressed, discussed and aired, for a number of reasons:

Allowing victims to speak allows the crimes to be documented and so evidence gathered for legal proceedings.
But it also allows for something equally important, which is for the victims’ voices to be heard, their ordeals to be recognised, and so some kind of closure to be achieved.
Legitimating speech on the subject also helps to overcome social taboos around shame and keeping silent, which obtain in many if not most societies.
So: speaking out both helps victims recover and contributes documentary evidence to investigations and trials.

As a survivor explains:

‘To leave a little bit of what I had behind, that affected me, you don’t forget it but you learn to live with it, and by talking you take off a weight, a stigma, so I leave relaxed, free and happy.’

Four charities

With these aims in mind in mind, the penultimate room focuses on the ongoing work of four NGOs working in the field of sexual violence in conflict, namely:

Women for Women International
All Survivors Project
Free Yezidi Foundation
Waging Peace

There’s a panel on each of these organisations, alongside photos of the work they do, and moving testimonials from victims who have benefited hugely from being listened to and validated. As one of them wrote:

‘We all want to mean something to someone, that we matter. That we’re important.’

These testimonies are accompanied by objects:

a traditional cloth toub titled ‘Peace by Piece’, created by Sudanese women affected by the war in collaboration with Waging Peace
a handmade animal toy created by women through Free Yezidi Foundation’s programme to empower women through training, job opportunities and income generation
policy and testimony from All Survivors Project, the only international NGO dedicated to addressing acts of sexual violence in conflict against men and boys

Installation view of Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict @ the Imperial War Museum showing panels explaining the work of three of the four featured NGOs, including written and spoken testimony (via the headphones) © Imperial War Museum

Why an exhibition like this is part of the solution

Having explained all these processes you can see why an exhibition like this fits into the process of solution, by 1) documenting and recording abuses 2) allowing victims’ voices to be heard 3) increasing public awareness and understanding 4) making it easier to discuss abuses and, potentially, identify and target the patterns of behaviour which underpin or lead to sexual violence: the underlying attitudes which have made it ‘acceptable’ or ignorable in the past.

I would say that two major threads or themes run through the exhibition, one about gender, the other about justice.

Gender norms

Charu Lata Hogg is the most feminist or deploys the most academic feminist point of view. All I mean by this is that in her interviews she talks liberally about toxic masculinity and the patriarchy, two phrases which don’t appear in any of the other interviewees.

Hogg claims that sexual violence in conflict does not take place in a vacuum. It follows logically from the gender stereotyping widespread in peacetime society and then promoted in much wartime propaganda. She sees sexual violence in conflict as arising directly from ‘toxic gender norms’ i.e. the widespread perception in so many societies which associates masculinity with strength, power, dominance and violence, and women with passivity, domesticity, secondariness and victimhood.

This is why the first room of the exhibition, immediately after the introductory videos, is devoted to an impressively large number of images, posters and propaganda leaflets etc, from the First and Second World wars but also other conflicts, which play up to these gender stereotypes. They shows women as sexy spies, seducers, security risks, with a whole fleet of striking leaflets designed to be dropped over enemy troops depicting their beloveds back home having sex with non-combatants while they’re living in misery and fear at the front.

Installation view of Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict @ the Imperial War Museum showing posters promoting gender stereotyping in wartime © Imperial War Museum

In other words, the exhibition argues that the widespread deployment of sexual and gender stereotyping in peacetime society feeds into the propaganda accompanying a conflict, and both lay the foundation for the sexual violence which then occurs in the conflict itself.

In the final room of videos which addresses possible solutions, Hogg returns to this theme and says the only way forward is to target the patriarchy, to target ‘toxic gender norms’ and target ‘the patriarchal seeds’ that establish these gender stereotypes at such an early age, and so ubiquitously, that when conflict arises, men act accordingly, i.e. abuse the exaggerated positions of power which conflict gives them in order to rape, enslave, terrorise, mutilate and murder the vulnerable i.e. mostly (but not only) women.

You can see that this approach has a number of weaknesses. 1) It’s problematic knowing exactly what you mean by ‘patriarchy’ and ‘patriarchal seeds’; in a general way probably everyone could agree with the idea that, despite half a century of feminism, it’s still ‘a man’s world’, but can you be more specific? 2) ‘Targeting the patriarchy’ sounds fine as a slogan but, like ‘levelling up’ or ‘Make America Great Again’, the challenge is in formulating concrete proposals to make this happen.

3) But surely the biggest problem is that if you tie sexual violence in conflict to every type of gender stereotyping across all of society, and claim that you won’t be able to end the violence until you’ve ended all gender stereotyping, this means you’re going to be waiting a very long time. It is, in other words, a utopian wish rather than a practical solution.

Justice

This is why I was more attracted by Christina Lamb’s contribution in the final video room which discusses the way forward. Lamb says the solution is simple: hold the perpetrators to account. Encourage and support victims to speak out (as per the work of the NGOs listed above). Document the crimes. Empower international bodies such as the United Nations’ International Court of Justice to set up courts of enquiry into specific conflicts. Gather evidence, name names, and bring individuals to justice.

Although this has proven dismayingly difficult in practice, it is at least a practical agenda, and it harmonises with work already going on i.e. it can be based on the speaking out supported by the NGOs and also helps to validate the accounts of victims, make them feel that they’re not being ignored.

In this practical area of justice progress has been made over the last 30 years or so, which the exhibition describes.

Timeline

1919 Commission of Responsibilities established with rape near the top of the list of 32 war crimes.

1946 but at the war crimes tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo not a single prosecution for sexual violence.

1949 Geneva Convention, Article 27:

Women shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault.

1993 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY):

Men and women came forward to recount evils beyond imagining – women and girls locked up in schools and suffering repeated anal, oral and vaginal rape, people having their tongues cut off, or being burned alive as human torches as they ‘screamed like cats’ (p.160)

1994 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) established in Arusha in Tanzania and for the first time recognises rape as an instrument of genocide to be prosecuted as a war crime.

1998 First conviction for rape as a war crime.

1998 The Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, defined rape as a war crime.

2000 UN Security Council Resolution 1325 is the first formal and legal document from the Security Council that required parties in a conflict to prevent violations of women’s rights, to support women’s participation in peace negotiations and in post-conflict reconstruction, and to protect women and girls from wartime sexual violence.

2008 UN Security Council passed Resolution 2008 stating that ‘rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide’.

2009 Establishment of the office of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict.

2019 First conviction by the International Criminal Court for rape in wartime.

2019 Report of the UN Special Representative listed 19 countries where women are being raped in war, by 12 armies and police forces and 41 non-state actors.

Reconciliation

The comfort women

But it’s not only justice in the sense of arresting and charging individuals. Only by acknowledging the existence of sexual violence can any progress be made towards broader reconciliation.

The most striking example, and also an example of how difficult this is in practice, is probably the case of the ‘comfort women’ of south-east Asia. Before and during the Second World War the Japanese Army forced hundreds of thousands of women and girls into sexual slavery. They came from many different nationalities but the large majority were from Korea.

The exhibition describes the Wednesday demonstration, more fully the ‘Wednesday Demonstration demanding that Japan redress the Comfort Women problems’, which began to assemble outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul at noon on Wednesdays in 1992. Japan claims to have made a formal apology for the scandal and to have offered reparations but the wrangle goes on about precise details.

Meanwhile, the Koreans have erected several statues in memory of the comfort women, one outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul, another in front of the Japanese consulate in the southern port city of Busan. Here’s a newspaper article about it. The exhibition includes a miniature reproduction of this statue with an explanation of its symbolism.

Installation view of Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict @ the Imperial War Museum showing a tiny replica of the Korean Sonyeosang or statue of peace, and the panel explaining its symbolism © Imperial War Museum

My overview

I asked at the museum Information desk but there is, regrettably, no catalogue for the exhibition, so I intend to provide a public service and give a fairly thorough breakdown of its content. It is in six rooms. The headings are the titles of each room, the bullet points are sub-sections within each room.

1. Prologue

Video clips of the experts addressing the following questions:

What is sexual violence in conflict?
Who is affected by sexual violence in conflict? Mostly women but some men and boys, particularly homosexuals
Who are the perpetrators? Armies, militias, military police, armed bands
Does sexual violence in conflict still happen today? Yes, widespread in current conflicts including Ukraine, Sudan
Why are we talking about this now? It is bad now but with the stresses and displacements of climate change is only likely to get worse

2. Structures and representations

Wartime presentations: sexist imagery and propaganda (see photo, above) including a couple of unintentionally hilarious films from the 1940s informing soldiers about the risks of sexually transmitted infections
Power and accountability:

3. Acts and manifestations

Mass incidents:
- Red Army: the mass rapes carried out by the Red Army as it fought its way across Germany at the end of the Second World War; Stalin notoriously commenting that he could understand why battle-scarred soldiers would want to have some ‘fun’ with enemy women; over 2 million German women were abused, leading to death and serious injury, infections and suicide
- ISIS: in 2014 Islamic State authorities organised the enslavement and mass sexual abuse of Yazidi women and girls: the exhibition includes the guidelines ISIS published for its soldiers on how to capture and treat sex slaves
Power imbalance: the little-known stories of sexual abuse of evacuees, particularly children, including in Britain during the Second World War
Sexual humiliation and torture:
- Abu Ghraib: the show includes the New Yorker magazine article by Seymour Hersh detailing the shocking abuse of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003
- les tondues: French women who, at the liberation of villages, towns and cities, were seized, displayed and had their hair shaven off as a form of punishment and social condemnation for alleged collaboration with the German occupiers – the show includes documentary photos of tondues taken by Lee Miller

Installation view of Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict @ the Imperial War Museum showing, on the wall on the right, the section about comfort women; on the wall in the middle evidence of the ISIS mass enslavement of Yazidi women; and in the glass cases letters and memoirs from child evacuees who were sexually abused © Imperial War Museum

4. Justice and reconciliation

Legal justice: history of attempts to set up courts and tribunals starting with the first arrest warrants for rape issued by the Yugoslavia tribunal in 1993; in 1998 the International Criminal Court recognised sexual violence in conflict as a crime against humanity
Children born of sexual violence in conflict: the work of TRIAL International and The Forgotten Children of War Association and how it took until 2022 for Bosnia and Herzegovina to acknowledge children born as a result of sexual violence during the Bosnian War 1992–1995 as civilian victims of war

5. Rebuilding

As described, a panel apiece on the four charities:

Women for Women International
All Survivors Project
Free Yezidi Foundation
Waging Peace

6. Final thoughts

Video room with the five experts listed above giving their thoughts on the following topics:

How are attitudes towards sexual violence in conflict changing?
Why is it important to listen to victims and survivors?
What does justice look like for victims and survivors?
How can we create change?

Installation view of Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict @ the Imperial War Museum showing the videos of expert opinion (photo by the author)

Niggles

On 2 November the exhibition ends and will be dismantled. Why? Surely an exhibition on such an important and universal subject as this should become a permanent display. Not least if it’s true, as the curators claim, that sexual conflict has always been a part of war and continues to be, right up to the present day. Well then, shouldn’t a key element of conflict be addressed in a permanent display in Britain’s leading museum of war and conflict?

In the same spirit, why is there no catalogue of the exhibition? I’ve been to hundreds of exhibitions, and even the most trashy or superficial have usually been accompanied by catalogues or brochures. Surely an important exhibition on such an important subject warrants a permanent documentary record.

Poster created by the Mansudae Art Studio, Pyongyang. The text, in Korean, can be translated as: ‘No! Rid the twenty-first century of sexual violence!’

Support

At the end of the exhibition, there’s a list of support groups. For public information, I include it here:

Books & Boots