"Rape remains the least condemned war crime; throughout the history, the rape of hundreds of thousands of women and children in all regions of the world has been a bitter reality."
In the context of this statement, the term "gender-based crimes" refers to crimes committed against people because of their socially constructed roles as women, men, girls or boys. Gender-based crimes include crimes of sexual violence, such as rape and sexual slavery, but are not restricted to these crimes. Gender is manipulated to serve as a weapon and even if being female is a risk factor, gender-based crimes are of concern to both men and women. However, it is an unfortunate fact that women and girls tend to be the most targeted for gender-based crimes, especially for sexually violent crimes. There are more documented crimes towards women than towards men. For this reason, the examples given in this paper, especially those concerning rape will focus principally on gender-based crimes directed towards women.
[...] Moreover, it has been recognized that gender-base crimes could take place in wartime and peacetime. As issue of international security, gender-based crimes can be condemned according to three types of crimes: as war crime[12], as crime against humanity (serious crimes committed on a mass scale against a civilian population), and as an act of genocide (intent of the perpetrators to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group). Condemnations of gender-based crimes, and especially towards women, such as rapes, are actually difficult to make effective. [...]
[...] To conclude, gender-based crimes are committed in every war and conflict and against both men and women. There is an urgent need to protect witnesses so that they do not have fear of testifying and it is fundamental to improve the way of collecting and interpreting data to take into account the concerns of the entire civilian population. The gender-sensitive advances found in the Rome Statute ought to be incorporated into national systems; it is only in this way that gender justice can be made global and solve this issue of international security. [...]
[...] Actually gender-based crimes concern civilians, and most of the time men who are soldiers. That is why gender-based crimes towards men are not taken into account in studies; data on male deaths in war need to be disaggregated between male ‘battle deaths' and massacre of ‘civilian males' in order to disrupt these gendered assumptions[10]. The first international prosecution of gender-based crimes took place after WWII at the international military tribunal for the Far East, also called the “Tokyo tribunal”. Changes were brought in the recognition and prosecution of gender-based crimes and then international criminal tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR) were created and issued judgments addressing rape as torture, rape as an instrument of terror, enslavement, castration, and forced nudity. [...]
[...] In these situations, gender intersects with other aspects of the identity such as ethnicity, religion, social class or political affiliation, making gender-based crimes an issue of international security. For instance in Bosnia, the aim was to mark the territory, to make it Serbian by giving birth to Serbian children. Gender-based crimes are also an issue of international security because they are conducted by military objective; the aim is to terrorize populations or ethnic groups. By degrading a particular community, authors of those crimes achieve a specific political end dictated by the authorities through propagandist messages. [...]
[...] Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives : Sexual Violence during the Rwanda genocide and its aftermath, p Human Rights Watch/FIDH interview, Rusatira commune, Rwanda, March Liberia's constitution is one of the few to recognize citizenship rights to children born of rape. ‘Guerres contre la vie', Donnard G., Femmes dans la guerre aujourd'hui. “Women shall be especially protected against any attack of their honor, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault” (article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention). [...]
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