By What are weapons of mass destruction if not psychological? What is power if not destroying a group of people and their descendants? What is war without the sexual violence of men, women, and children?
Gruesome images began to surface on Dec. 6, 2023, of Palestinian men in Northern Gaza stripped to their underwear. The men were blindfolded, with hands behind their backs, kneeling on the ground with IOF soldiers torturing them. Any man who refused to undress was immediately shot. The IOF claimed detainees to be Hamas soldiers, but evidence revealed the men were innocent civilians, including one known journalist. Social media and Middle Eastern news outlets quickly began reposting the images, outraged and terrified by the demoralizing acts of war.
Rape was always seen as an unavoidable consequence of war. It was inevitable, expected, and sometimes normalized by both the victim’s community and the perpetrator. It is only in recent literature and humanitarian law that it is now understood as a weapon in war, as opposed to a consequence. Sexual assault is a war crime and an effective tool to dehumanize, demoralize, and ethnically cleanse marginalized populations. While some soldiers “power trip” and rape women for their own sexual satisfaction, rape is also used to further destabilize power dynamics between the oppressor and the oppressed through racial and heterosexist frameworks.
“Sexual violence in conflict needs to be treated as the war crime that it is; it can no longer be treated as an unfortunate collateral damage of war,” says Zainab Hawa Bangura — former UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict.
Sexual violence is a crime that entirely aims to diminish a person’s value as an autonomous human. The crime elicits a message to the victim and the world that the perpetrator is more valuable than the victim. Narratives around rape create and uphold these unequal distributions of power as sexual violence continues to displace groups, cause unwanted pregnancies, traumatize victims, and spread disease. This article will discuss sexual assault against men and women as a weapon of mass destruction.
Rape against women
Women are frequently victims of sexual violence — especially in our day-to-day lives. Many of us might be victims of sexual violence ourselves, but all of us know at least one person who is a victim. In order for us to understand the power structures of both the victim and the perpetrator, and the forces at play protecting offenders, we need to discuss the social parameters of femininity, masculinity, culture, and religion.
Socially formed biological perspectives include femininity and womanhood as caregiving, cooking, cleaning, poise, modesty, and shyness. Historically, society viewed women as the weaker gender. Women are the nurses, rather than the soldiers on the frontlines. They are the teachers rather than the entrepreneurs. These social norms are long embedded in all communities across the globe. As such, rape during war aims to further promote women’s subordination, and feminize men in order to re-establish harmful gender expectations.
Sexual violence against religious communities is an intentional tool to further demoralize civilians and enemy soldiers. Sex before marriage is viewed as a sin by all three Abrahamic religions — Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. In religious contexts, modesty and purity, as seen through head coverings, are clearly discussed in the Quran, Bible, and Torah. Especially in Middle Eastern cultures where sexual purity is intensely valued, rape is often highly unreported out of fear of scrutiny and shame. As such, soldiers in war will often rape women not only for their own pleasure but to destroy their bodily autonomy, as well as their relationships with their faiths. The soldiers know the social repercussions of rape, and that these women will often stay silent to avoid shame and a sully reputation. Similar to how many women in Western societies stay silent, victims across seas also feel guilty for a crime they didn’t commit and fear being ostracized from their communities.
The continued discourse on sexual violence as a weapon must be revisited and become perceived as a war crime with immeasurable consequences.
Examples of rape in warfare are prevalent in every violent conflict. In WWII, Allied and Axis armies would rape women to terrorize civilians and discourage enemy troops. In the 1990s, rape became a tool in ethically cleansing Yugoslavians by impregnating the women. During the Rwandan genocide, HIV-infected Hutu men would rape Tutsi women to spread disease. Reports indicate 250,000 to 500,000 women were sexually assaulted in the Rwandan genocide within three months, approximately, 20,000 to 50,000 women in the Bosnia-Herzegovina war, and more than 200,000 in the Democratic Republic of Congo since 1996.
As a result of thousands of sexual assault cases during the war, in 1993 the United Nations Commission on Human Rights declared “systematic rape and military sexual slavery to be crimes against humanity punishable as violations of women’s human rights.”
Rape against men
The key to understanding masculinity and femininity is through evolutionary psychology. Researchers believe men developed strict social norms for manhood as determined by ancestral survival needs and continue to be enforced today through prolonged gender inequality in schools, workplaces, and social institutions. While these rigid frameworks of manhood inherently hurt both men and women, they stem from male/male battles for resources, women, and power. The most efficient means of survival was by being stronger, more intelligent, and more aggressive than all the other men. Toxic masculinity now exists as an extremist view that real men are aggressive and forceful while women must be quiet and submissive. As such, researchers utilize the term “feminization” when discussing the effects of rape against men in war, as victims of rape are mainly women.
Feminizing the enemy through sexual violence is an effective and humiliating tactic in war. Society has contributed to the idea that “real” men cannot be raped, and male rape is an issue that exists solely within the parameters of homosexuality. In cultures where homosexuality is discouraged and sometimes prohibited, men who are raped by other men often feel intense shame — socially and religiously. In being stripped of their dominance and power, victims often feel confused, unsafe, and unsure of their identity as a man. They begin to question their manhood after repeatedly being raped as prisoners. Emasculating men depicts a narrative in which aggression is true power, and true power is manhood.
Terrifyingly, male rape in war is often documented by the perpetrator, suppressed by the victim and the rapist, only to be discovered long after soldiers return to their homes and a broken country is left with remnants of a once-blooming nation. With each passing generation, people begin to wonder how such acts of war were ever permitted, but when they occur in the present time, those same people question the validity of the photographs.
Documented sexual violence against men in war
On first seeing the images of the Palestinian men, my mind quickly sifted through the archive of blurry photos in my memory. The images felt familiar, and suddenly it came to me that there are two rather infamous cases in which sexual violence was photographed by soldiers in war. These images would later testify against them.
During WWII, Nazis would strip Jews of their clothing, photograph them naked, and submit them to physical and mental torture. The images are easily accessible online, revealing men and women with blank stares forced in front of the camera. Some images show naked men in a “death pit” awaiting their fate as they cover their genitals with their hands. Jewish women were often stripped and shaved as soon as they arrived at the concentration camps and were whipped naked in front of male viewers. The dehumanization continued as menstruating women lacked any and all tools needed to manage their period blood. Holocaust survivors recall experiences in which standing in “roll call” would include blood trickling down their legs. As women began to miss their periods, many feared the possibility of infertility. This in itself was understood as a form of sexual violence.
Additionally, tales of Abu Ghraib Prison are inexplicable acts of evil. The US involvement in Iraq following the 2003 invasion unveiled highly under-reported instances of male rape. U.S. soldiers were in control of the prison where countless innocent Iraqi men were humiliated, degraded, and raped daily. Images on Google show naked Iraqi men, wincing on the floor while U.S. soldiers stand fully clothed clearly in a position of power.
Prisoners were stripped naked, raped, and forced to masturbate in front of male and female US soldiers. Notably, some images show naked Iraqi men lying on top of one another to further demoralize and diminish Iraqi men’s value. In a culture that greatly values dominant men, modesty, and heterosexuality as the norm, men were often humiliated in front of female U.S. soldiers who were described as “some of the most active perpetrators.” The female rapists often smeared dye — resembling menstrual blood — on Iraqi men’s naked bodies. Sexual abuse, especially perpetrated by white offenders, is used to further destabilize power dynamics through racist and sexist contexts. The US military later admitted that such degradation was used to weaken prisoners into compliant questioning. I recommend “A Decade after Abu Ghraib: Lessons in Softening Up the Enemy and Sex-Based Humiliation” by Johanna Bond to further understand the profound evil committed against Iraqi men, through a historical and social framework.
Palestine shares similar views on gender norms, homosexuality, and religion as Iraq. In the context of the Gazan genocide, rape, and sexual assault is being used as a tactic to dehumanize and demoralize Palestinian men and women into complacency, shame, and helplessness. And, it’s working. The greatest difference between Abu Ghraib Prison and the images from this week is social media. We are now in an age where images, videos, and news spread quickly.
Social media users are not simply horrified, but disgusted and enraged watching the animalization of Palestinian men. The continued discourse on sexual violence as a weapon must be revisited and become perceived as a war crime with immeasurable consequences. Its effects will outlive any of us, persisting in maiming future generations of Palestine and its survivors.
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