Reframing Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in Conflict

Abstract

Abstract This chapter critically reviews the scholarship on sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and highlights the relative absence of analysis of SGBV in low-intensity and protracted conflict environments. This absence is particularly significant for the Asian region. To date, most research on SGBV investigates its occurrence, prevalence, perpetrators, victims, and survivors in high-intensity conflict environments and genocide. Primary understanding of conflict-related SGBV, however, depends upon prior identification of a situation as “conflict-affected.” As a result of the substantial focus on high-intensity conflicts during this period, SGBV in Burma, the Philippines, Timor Leste, North Korea, and postconflict Cambodia and Sri Lanka were not studied to the same extent as Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where reports of mass sexual violence captured global public attention. This chapter argues that attention to SGBV in low-intensity, protracted conflict situations merits further study.