RAPE, A WEAPON OF GENOCIDE

[ WARNING. TRIGGERING TOPIC]

Over the course if my school year, my Genocide class has learned various different ways perpetrators try to eliminate their targets. One of the most common things we noticed was the use of rape as a weapon. I believe that rape as a weapon in Genocide is one of the cruelest forms of taking down a target group. Why do I believe this? Simply because unlike where killing someone, the pain of rape is forever left on the victim. Death is peaceful compared to rape. Death happens in one moment. However, rape is something that will effect a victim for the rest of their life. Rape could leave permanent scars on the person mentally and in many cases force the victim to be shunned out of their community.

 
Why is rape such an effective way of destroying a target group? This could be for various reasons. During Genocide, some women were raped to the point where their uterus was destroyed; making them unable to conceive. This stops the creation of further generations of the target group. In other cases, women were raped and impregnated. The reason for this was to force out the targets group blood. In simpler words, it was an attempt to cleanse the next generation by forcing their blood to become more “pure”.

 

For me, I find it this subject rather difficult to talk about. Since rape is already a very harsh topic that makes many people uncomfortable (I am one of those people). As a class, we decided to have a more in depth conversations along this topic. We read an essay about it and it really opened my eyes to how harmful rape as a weapon in Genocide can be. One of the more eye opening thoughts was a question that we all needed to answer before the text and then tried to answer again after. Are women human? Everyone would say yes to this question, but is this truly the case? Women are treated completely differently to men in most cases. There are many injustices that occur because women are regarded differently than men. At the end of the essay, it concluded with the idea that women are believed to be human but are treated completely unfairly.

One thing that I found interesting is how rape was always in the background in every Genocide I have studied (trust me there are quite a few in the 20th century that many don't know about). Only until more recent Genocides, was rape more prominent. Such as the genocide in Bosnia, where rape was such a prominent thing.

I believe that the Genocide in Bosnia is where we see rape as a strongly used weapon. This could be caused by how the genocide was organized. In this Genocide, there was lots of division between the men and the women. While the men were (pretty much) killed first and then the women and children were taken away. Rape was very systematic in the destruction of the target group.  

In many genocides, rape is one of the most common traits. However, it's hard to believe how it's the first time rape was introduced as a weapon in Genocide, was during the trials for the Genocide in Rwanda. I find this very displeasing. As a society we should have lots more awareness about genocides and how to deal with these events better.