“There are still tons of questions” regarding sexual violence in the context of civil war, said Dara Kay Cohen ’01, assistant professor of public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, during a lecture at the Watson Institute for International Studies Thursday evening.
The event, “Explaining Rape During Civil War,” was the first talk this semester in the Watson Institute’s Security Seminar Series, which aims to bring academia and modern policy discussions together.
Cohen spoke extensively about her research regarding the use of rape during contemporary civil conflicts, particularly in Sierra Leone, El Salvador and East Timor.
“Recently there has been an explosion of policy interest in rape during wartime,” Cohen said, adding that most of the previous research in the field has focused on fatal violence. “The number of bodies is easier to count than non-lethal forms of violence.”
Rape, particularly gang rape, is more difficult to study, Cohen added. “Seemingly ordinary people, when forced into armed groups, can go on to commit group crimes, people who are not necessarily prone to violence.”
Though the reasons are uncertain, many have speculated that opportunism, ethnic hatred and gender inequality are the main factors behind this type of sexual violence, Cohen said. But there are very few studies supporting these theories.
“My argument: combatant socialization,” she said. Groups — such as the Civil Defense Forces and the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone — that arbitrarily recruit their fighters by force, particularly through abduction, “face a central dilemma, which is then how to create a coherent armed group out of virtual strangers.”
One way to create a cohesive armed force is gang rape. It’s “not about military effectiveness,” but about allowing “the group to function on the most basic level,” Cohen said. “Violence increases cohesion.”
Between 2006 and 2008, Cohen conducted 210 interviews with former combatants in Sierra Leone, which underwent a civil war from 1991 to 2002. “People were surprisingly open about this topic,” she said.
Many of the men she interviewed made statements such as, “‘After (gang rape), we would feel good and talk about it a lot, discuss it among ourselves and laugh about it,’” she said. Cohen added that there was a significant need to be perceived as virile and strong.
“Twenty-five percent of the RUF is female, and there is mounting evidence” of women participating in gang rapes, both of men and of other women, Cohen said. The women in the forces were concerned about fitting in with their fellow soldiers just as much as the men and would resort to the same types of violent behavior.
But overall in the field of wartime sexual violence, the data is hard to quantify, and often numbers are badly extrapolated and generalized from smaller reported incidents, Cohen said. “I try to get away from that by not really talking about victim numbers.”
Cohen focused mostly on correlations between the abduction of fighters for the armed groups and the instances of gang rape. “The groups that abducted most, raped most,” she said, most likely because of the larger need for cohesion in abducted groups.
The CDF first recruited its forces voluntarily, but as it began to abduct more members, it increasingly participated in gang rapes, Cohen said.
In 1999, when militias in East Timor began to recruit through impressment, instances of gang rape by the militias skyrocketed.
But at the same time, there were no “orders from commanders to commit these crimes,” Cohen said. The fighters in lower positions would commit gang rape without a command and without threats from their overseers.
The organization of group violence to form social bonds has been seen in many instances outside of civil conflict, she added, citing street gangs, prisons and fraternities.
Ross Cheit, professor of political science and public policy — who was Cohen’s thesis adviser when she was an undergraduate — asked Cohen about the possible reasons for this type of problem on a campus or in a fraternity.
She responded that she often looked at “fraternity gang rape to inform my research. … There are very strong social pressures to be perceived as masculine and be a part of the group.”
“People are anxious about their place in the social circle,” she added, citing the “red zone,” which is a name for the first seven or eight weekends of the school year, when most campus rapes take place.
But “we just don’t know the answer” to why some fraternities or sports teams resort to this type of violent group behavior as opposed to other activities and why some do not, Cohen said. “There’s a lot of open questions.”
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