Children of bad memories

Abstract

Throughout history, the international discourse about armed conflicts has turned a blind eye to the issue of rape, conceptualising it as an inevitable by-product of war. The 20th century witnessed rape being used as a weapon of war more consciously as a means to demoralise and destroy the enemy. The 1937 Japanese occupation of China’s wartime capital, for example, became known as the Rape of Nanking. Although military tribunals were established to enforce accountability to those responsible for the heinous crimes committed during such conflicts, rape has continued to remain invisible as a war crime and hence is rarely sanctioned. Conflicts in the former Yugoslavia (1992) and Rwanda (1994) have, however, promoted immense attention to mass rape, for it was used as a tactic in the genocidal intent of the conflict. Women were held in rape camps with the specific aim to impregnate them with a child of the enemy. Evidence of the pregnancies resulting from rape in these conflicts aroused interest in the international legal and feminist communities, because “rape-induced pregnancy was presented as a worse crime against women than rape itself”. 2