Rape, Genocide, and Women's Human Rights

In this article, the author examines how sexual violence against women has traditionally been kept outside of the realm of violations of human rights. She argues that crimes that fall under such violations are crimes that are perpetrated on men and women indiscriminately, whereas sexual violence against women is legally seen as 'private' and therefore, has not been understood as a violation of women's humanity. The exclusion of sexual violence from violations of human rights, it is argued, stems from the fact that, while women are typically raped by individual men and not by governments, most human rights instruments empower states to act against states, not individuals or groups to act for themselves. Through the prism of the genocidal conflict in the former Yugoslavia, the author demonstrates that rapes are more than 'private' crimes perpetrated by individuals; they are an instrument of the war, a method of ethnic cleansing. Rape is both a violation of human rights and a violence against women. As a result, the author advocates in favour of a radical shift in the way that human rights apply to women: instead of looking at human rights law to see how much of what happens to women can be fit into it, we should look at the reality of women's lives first and hold human rights law accountable to what women need.