Mullins, Christopher. "'We are Going to Rape You and Taste Tutsi Women': Rape during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide". The British Journal of Criminology, Vol.49, No.6 (2009): 719-735.

Mullins, Christopher. "'We are Going to Rape You and Taste Tutsi Women': Rape during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide". The British Journal of Criminology, Vol.49, No.6 (2009): 719-735.

• Despite the widespread nature and reporting of sexual violence during conflict, the scholarly literature on the subject is minimal and depends on general theoretical assertions based on surface understandings of rape, ignoring the wealth of case studies and individual data available for analysis (719-720).
• The general account of rape in wartime is provided by Dr. Brownmiller, who describes rape as a natural consequence of masculine desire for violence and conquest, enacted on women following the completion of similar violence versus male soldiers. Her pseudo-biological account of wartime rape, however, fails to account for the organization of rape during the Yugoslav Wars and the Rwandan Genocide to accomplish military and genocidal goals (720).
• The account of sexual violence provided by Dr. Brownmiller and others also fails to account for the disparity of sexual violence in different conflicts. It does not explain why rape is so widespread in conflict in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, but relatively rare in the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Peruvian civil war (721).
• Through a study of cases brought before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the author discovers that, "In general, three broad types of assaults were identified: opportunistic assaults, which seemed to be a product of the disorder inherent within the conflict; episodes of sexual enslavement; and genocidal rapes, which were framed by the broader genocidal endeavours occurring at the time" (720, 724-725).
• The conflicts in Rwanda and Yugoslavia mark a decisive break in the role of sexual violence in warfare, as they are the first recorded examples of systematic sexual violence being ordered as a tactic to advance war aims. Many previous conflicts mention widespread sexual violence, often on a systematic scale, but this does not appear to be an actual tactic (721).
• Beginning with the genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda and continued in a number of conflicts in Africa, military forces have begun to use 'genocidal rape', defined as sexual violence with the express purpose to generate fear, humiliate the population, and create ethnically-mixed children to spoil ethnic identity (721-722).
• The use of genocidal rape not terrorizes nearby communities, but also destroys the typical patriarchal values of those communities. By raping women, soldiers rob men of their traditional roles as protectors and undermine patriarchal power structures. Raped women often face marginalization and limited social opportunities (722).
• The production of mixed-race children through genocidal rape produce three effects which destroy the traditional bonds of the harmed community: the mere existence of these children as reminders of violence and humiliation, the general neglect of these children which produces a new underclass, and the destruction of typical patterns of inheritance and identity which disrupt ethnic identity (722).
• In the late Spring of 1994, a massive genocidal campaign of violence was organized in Rwanda by ethnic Hutus and Twas against Tutsis, and those perceived as Tutsi sympathizers. The genocide had been planned well in advance, with ethnic militias begin searches and setting up roadblocks within minutes of President Habyarimana's plane being shot down (723).
• At the start of the genocide, on 6 April 1994, the killings were organized via a pre-prepared list of individuals identified as Tutsis or Tutsi sympathizers. Most executions were carried out by presidential guards and members of the armed forces (723).
• By 9 April, the violence in Kigali had spurred the Tutsi-interests military, Rwandan Patriotic Front [RPF], to mobilize as it began moving south from its base in the country's North towards Kigali. By 12 April, the RPF and the armed forces had clashed and the violence was decentralized to other actors (723).
• The militia organized to carry out violence had grown to 50,000 men by the second week of April, and they received orders from a centralized body of coordinators made up of the rump Kigali government and local councils. These militias were consistently aided by the general population, which either supported Hutu supremacy, did not want to be targeted for non-participation, or both. As many as a million people were killed, mostly between April and May, with sexual assault, beatings, and robbery even more widespread (723).
• Opportunistic rapes are defined as instances of sexual violence resulting from the general chaos associated with military action. They are not ordered and are driven by personal desires rather than tactic or strategic considerations. It was discovered to be the least common form of rape in Rwanda, or at least the least common that the International Tribunal dealt with (726).
• In some cases of rape, opportunistic elements blended with genocidal elements. Soldiers or paramilitaries undertaken sexual violence as part of wider genocidal campaigns often chose their individual victims based on opportunistic factors like attraction or vulnerability (726).
• Sexual enslavement is defined as instances when a women is held captive and subject to repeated sexual assault over the course of days, weeks, or months. These instances of sexual violence were often committed by the Interahamwe, the ethnic Hutu militia during the conflict (727).
• The vast majority of cases in this paper, and of those considered by the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, were instances of genocidal rape. These instances of rape were ordered by military forces for the specific purpose of impersonal sexual violence, often followed by the murder of the victims (728).
• Instances of genocidal rape were combined with ethnically-derogatory language and purposefully humiliation, such as forced public nudity, an especially humiliating act in Rwandan culture. The sexual violence was purposefully cruel, with victims often raped in front of crowds or family or with objects other than the penis (728-729, 731).
• The bodies of victims of genocidal rape were often mutilated after death, usually to mimic the sexual violence that victims experienced during their rape. This serves to underscore the intense emphasis on violence and humiliation rather than sexual release during the conflict (730).
• The impunity provided by the wider conflict allowed specific men to perpetrate violence against specific women based on pre-existing tensions or desires. The only sources of authority encouraged such behavior, especially by militia members. This is most clearly seen in cases of sexual slavery, where personal desires were disguised as military aims (730).
• The group nature of the violence, both in the sense that it was encouraged by the military command structure, and that many of the instances of violence were gang rapes, demonstrates the organized nature of the violence. While personal desires explain some rapes, the ability of military culture and peer-pressure to encourage conformity among soldiers -- in this context encouraging rapes -- explains how rape became so widespread (731).
• "The question arises, why humiliate a population that is in the process of being completely destroyed? What goals could be accomplished through sexual violence that couldn't be accomplished through homicide? Clearly, most of the Interahamwe who used rape as a weapon of genocide had no compulsion against killing women" (731).
• The author responds by describing mass rape as a way of making sure that the ethnic community is utterly humiliated before its ultimate destruction. This is intended to guarantee that not only will the population be destroyed, but the memories of that population will be of violence and humiliation (731-732).
• The author suggests that Hutu men could have used genocidal violence, in the 'manly' acts of both murder and rape, to reclaim a masculine identity and sense of ethnic pride which they had previously been denied due to systemic poverty and social marginalization under the Tutsi power structure (732).
• Good article, but the major omission is the focus on sexual violence against adult women. The motivations and social effects of sexual violence against men and children is certain to different from adult women and from each other, leaving the theoretical basis of the research and its conclusions unnecessarily incomplete.